I hope my readers, whether gentle or simple, will do me the favour to read this Preface, as I wish to explain a little, perhaps apologise a little, after the usual fashion of people who write their reminiscences. According to custom, I had better begin by stating that it was at the instigation of many personal friends, some of them men of literary tastes and distinction, that I overcame my cowardice to embark on what appeared to me a most hazardous enterprise; but one in which I have found so much pleasure and relaxation—during hours of failing health and growing blindness—that I have often been tempted to say, “Oh that these pages might amuse the reader half as much as they have done the writer.” The choice of a title, which, as Mr Motley in one of his delightful letters says, ought to be “selling and telling” occupied me for a very short time, as far as I myself was concerned. The name of “Vanessa” was endeared to me by old recollections, for I had gained that _sobriquet_ on one occasion, when a goodly troop of friends and relations was assembled in the country house of a dear cousin. These companions “who did converse and waste the time together,” enrolled themselves into a band and gave each other fanciful, and as they considered at the time, appropriate names, or nicknames, what the Italians might call Ottias. For instance, a much-loved member of my family, “who looked well to the ways of her household,” and “ate not the bread of idleness,” was christened “Melissa,” or the working-bee; another, whose short-sight was one of his only shortcomings, was dubbed “Belisarius,” while I was unanimously hailed as “Vanessa,” or the Butterfly. This circumstance, coupled with the love I had for all that was bright, variegated, motley, for bright colours, bright flowers, bright scenes, bright sunshine, made me resolve on the “Autobiography of a Butterfly.” More than one friend argued against my choice, saying it conveyed a wrong impression of my character and ways of thinking, inasmuch as it sounded frivolous and superficial, but I do not think so; it appears to me that the joyous flittings of a butterfly through a summer garden give rather a suitable notion of a wandering, chequered life, replete with light and happiness, or to make use of another metaphor, broken up into bits like an ancient mosaic pavement containing many particles of gold, with an incomplete pattern, so I have stood by my original title and chosen for my emblem a butterfly on the gnomon of that dial, “which only counts the hours that are serene”; for although in recording the days of a long life, the shadow of sorrow and bereavement must necessarily fall on some of the pages, yet it has been my earnest desire to dwell on the brighter side of things—to interest and amuse, rather than to sadden or depress.