I do not altogether wish to call this a book of character; for I do not exactly understand that word as the public has lately been taught to understand it. There is no peasant, or cobbler, or brick-layer's apprentice, in the whole book, endowed with superhuman qualities, moral and physical. There is no personage in high station--given as the type of a class--imbued with intense selfishness or demoniac passions, wicked without motive, heartless against common sense, and utterly degraded from that noble humanity, God's best and holiest gift to mankind. There is no meek, poor, puling, suffering lover, who condescends humbly to be bamboozled and befooled through three volumes, or Heaven knows how many numbers, for the sake of marrying the heroine in the end. I therefore cannot properly, in the present day, call it a work of character. I might call it, perhaps,--although the hero is an Englishman,--a picture of the times of Louis XIII; but, alas! I have not ventured to give a full picture of these times. We have become so uncommonly cleanly and decorous in our own days, that a mere allusion to the dirt and indecency of the age of our great-grandmothers is not to be tolerated. In order, indeed, to preserve something like verisimilitude, I have been obliged to glance, in one chapter, at the freedom of manners of the days to which I refer; but it has been a mere glance, and given in such a manner that the cheek of one who understands it, in the sense in which one of those very days would understand it, must have lost the power of blushing. At all events, it can never sully or offend the pure, nor lead the impure any further wrong. There are a great many explanations and comments, in illustration of the times, which I should like to give for the benefit of that part of my readers who have put on the right of knowing all things at the same time that the third change was made in their dress, and I would have done so, in notes; but, unfortunately, I do not write Greek; and a little incident prevented me from writing those notes in Latin. A work--a most interesting work--was published a few years ago in London, called the Bernstein Hexe, or Amber Witch. More than one translation appeared; and one of these had the original notes,--some written in Latin where they were peculiarly anatomical and indecent; but, to my surprise, I found that several ladies were fully versed in that sort of Latinity. I cannot flatter myself with having a sufficient command of the Roman tongue to be enabled to veil the meaning more completely from the unlearned.