The monastery; The abbot.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ABBOT. 269
It must be added, that the author's incognito gave him greater courage to
renew his attempts to please the public, and an advantage similar to that
which Jack the Giant-killer received from his coat of darkness. In sending
the Abbot forth so soon after the Monastery, he had used the well-known
practice recommended by Bassanio:"In my school days, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot another of the self-sane flight,
The self-same way, with more advised watch,
To find the other forth."
And, to continue the simile, his shafts, like those of the lesser Ajax, were
discharged more readily that the archer was as inaccessible to criticism,
personally speaking, as the Grecian archer under his brother's sevenfold
shield.
Should the reader desire to know upon what principles the Abbot was
expected to amend the fortune of the Monastery, I have first to request his
attention to the Introductory Epistle addressed to the imaginary Captain
Clutterbuck; a mode by which, like his predecessors in this walk of fiction,
the real author makes one of his dramatis personce the means of communicating his own sentiments to the public, somewhat more artificially than by
a direct address to the readers. A pleasing French writer of fairy tales,
Monsieur Pajon, author of the History of Prince Soly, has set a diverting
example of the same machinery, where he introduces the presiding Genius
of the land of Romance conversing with one of the personages of the tale.
In this Introductory Epistle, the author communicates, in confidence, to
Captain Clutterbuck, his sense that the White Lady had not met the taste
of the times, and his reason for withdrawing her from the scene. The
author did not deem it equally necessary to be candid respecting another
alteration. The Monastery was designed, at first, to have contained some
supernatural agency, arising out of the fact, that Melrose had been the place
of deposit of the great Robert Bruce's heart. The writer shrunk, however,
from filling up, in this particular, the sketch as it was originally traced;
nor did he venture to resume, in continuation, the subject which he had left
unattempted in the original work. Thus, the incident of the discovery of
the heart, which occupies the greater part of the Introduction to the Monastery, is a mystery unnecessarily introduced, and which remains at last very
imperfectly explained. In this particular, I was happy to shroud myself
by the example of the author of " Caleb Williams," who never condescends
to inform us of the actual contents of that Iron Chest which makes such a
figure in his interesting work, and gives the name to Mr. Colman's drama.
The public had some claim to inquire into this matter, but it seemed
indifferent policy in the author to give the explanation. For, whatever
praise may be due to the ingenuity which brings to a general combination
all the loose threads of a narrative, like the knitter at the finishing of her
stocking, I am greatly deceived if in many cases a superior advantage is
not attained, by the air of realitywhich the deficiency of explanation attaches
to a work written on a different system. In life itself, many things befall
every mortal, of which the individual never knows the real cause or origin;
and were we to point out the most marked distinction between a real and a
fictitious narrative, we would say, that the former in reference to the remote
causes of the events it relates, is obscure, doubtful, and mysterious; whereas,
in the latter case, it is a part of the author's duty to afford satisfactory
details upon the causes of the separate events he has recorded, and, in a
word, to account for every thing. The reader, like Mungo in the Padlock,
will not be satisfied with hearing what he is not made fully to comprehend.
I omitted, therefore, in the Introduction to the Abbot, any attempt to
explain the previous story, or to apologize for unintelligibility.
Neither would it have been prudent to have endeavoured to proclaim, in
the Introduction to the Abbot, the real spring, by which I hoped it might
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