Of all my numerous novels, Pelham and Godolphin are the only ones which take their absolute groundwork in what is called “The Fashionable World.” I have sought in each to make the general composition in some harmony with the principal figure in the foreground. Pelham is represented as almost wholly unsusceptible to the more poetical influences. He has the physical compound, which, versatile and joyous, amalgamates easily with the world--he views life with the lenient philosophy that Horace commends in Aristippus: he laughs at the follies he shares; and is ever ready to turn into uses ultimately (if indirectly) serious, the frivolities that only serve to sharpen his wit, and augment that peculiar expression which we term “knowledge of the world.” In a word, dispel all his fopperies, real or assumed, he is still the active man of crowds and cities, determined to succeed, and gifted with the ordinary qualities of success. Godolphin, on the contrary, is the man of poetical temperament, out of his place alike among the trifling idlers and the bustling actors of the world--wanting the stimulus of necessity--or the higher motive which springs from benevolence, to give energy to his powers, or definite purpose to his fluctuating desires; not strong enough to break the bonds that confine his genius--not supple enough to accommodate its movements to their purpose. He is the moral antipodes to Pelham. In evading the struggles of the world, he grows indifferent to its duties--he strives with no obstacles--he can triumph in no career. Represented as possessing mental qualities of a higher and a richer nature than those to which Pelham can pretend, he is also represented as very inferior to him in constitution of character, and he is certainly a more ordinary type of the intellectual trifler. The characters grouped around Godolphin are those with which such a man usually associates his life. They are designed to have a certain grace--a certain harmony with one form or the other of his twofold temperament:--viz., either its conventional elegance of taste, or its constitutional poetry of idea. But all alike are brought under varying operations of similar influences; or whether in Saville, Constance, Fanny, or Lucilla--the picture presented is still the picture of gifts misapplied--of life misunderstood. The Preacher who exclaimed, “Vanity of vanities! all is vanity,” perhaps solved his own mournful saying, when he added elsewhere, “This only have I found, that God made men upright--but they have sought out many inventions.” This work was first published anonymously, and for that reason perhaps it has been slow in attaining to its rightful station amongst its brethren--whose parentage at first was openly acknowledged. If compared with Pelham, it might lose, at the first glance, but would perhaps gain on any attentive reperusal.