The characters which I have introduced in my narrative (for the most part as transiently as the fleeting shadows of a magic lantern across a spectrum) are all intended to represent respectively classes having more or less of an Oriental stamp, some still existing unchanged—others on the wane—and a few, I would fain hope, who, like the Trunnions and Westerns (_parva componere magnis_) of the last age have wholly disappeared before the steadily increasing light of knowledge and civilization—influences destructive of those coarse humours, narrow prejudices, and eccentric traits, which, however amusing in the pages of the novelist, are wondrously disagreeable in real life. It is true, the gradual disappearance of these coarser features imposes on the painter of life and manners the necessity of cultivating a nicer perception—of working with a finer pencil, and of seizing and embodying the now less obvious indications of the feelings and passions—the more delicate lights and shades of mind and character—but still in parting in a great measure with the materials for coarse drollery and broad satire, the world perhaps on the whole will be a gainer; higher feelings will be addressed than those which minister to triumph and imply humiliation: for though ’tis well to laugh at folly and expose it—’twere perhaps better to have no folly or error to laugh at and expose. In the following pages, my wish has been to amuse, and where I could—without detriment to the professedly light and jocular character of the work—to instruct and improve. To hurt or offend has never entered into my contemplation—if such could ever be my object, I should not do it under a mask. I deem it necessary to make this observation _en passant_, lest, like a young officer I once heard of in India, who, conscience-stricken on hearing some of his besetting sins, as he thought, pointedly denounced, flung out of the church, declaring “there was no standing the chaplain’s personalities,” some of my readers should think that I have been taking, under cover, a sly shot at themselves or friends. That the characters lightly sketched in these Memoirs have been taken from life—_i.e._, that the ideas of them have been furnished by real personages—I in some measure candidly allow, though I have avoided making the portraits invidiously exact; as in a dream, busy fancy weaves a tissue of events out of the stored impressions of the brain, so, of course, the writer of a story must in like manner, though with more congruity, arrange and embody his scattered recollections, though not necessarily in the exact shape and order in which the objects, &c., originally presented themselves. Moreover, I believe I may safely add, that the originals of my sketches have, for the most part, long since brought “life’s fitful fever” to a close.