Excerpt from Reginald Hastings: Or a Tale of the Troubles in 164
The last few years have been very fruitful in the discovery of old Manuscripts, especially of such as are calculated to throw new light and interest on the important period of our Civil War. It has lately been my fortune to pass much time in the examination of this unprinted literature, and I feel a great interest, perhaps a prejudice, in favor of such unstudied compositions. The frank and manly, yet tender spirit that many of them breathe, the genuine feeling that they reveal, and the stirring incidents that they so naturally relate, attracted me. I was tempted, before laying them aside for graver studies, to endeavor to imitate them, or rather to present their meaning and information in a collective and continuous form. How little justice I have rendered to their merit or to my own design, the sternest critic cannot point out more plainly than I myself am ready to admit. I still venture to hope, however, that I have left enough of their genuine spirit unimpaired, to afford some interest.
Without attempting to confound the Author and the Editor, I can honestly affirm that the latter has not put into the mouth of the former a single sentiment, and scarcely an adventure, that may not be found in the Manuscripts relating to the great Civil War. The Autobiographer (of whom I must henceforth speak in the second person), has spoken for himself truly, if not otherwise commendably.
One fault (or merit, as the case may be) of an Autobiography, is that it necessarily leaves its chief moral deductions to the Reader: the Biographer may make his personages a text for inculcating high and pure and noble principles, whether by the example or the warning of his hero: the Autobiographer can, from the nature of his case, only furnish forth his own adventures and experience, for such deductions as the wisdom or the ingenuity of the Reader may distill from them. The same argument of course applies to fictitious autobiography. In both cases, the utility and success of the work must depend mainly on the Reader, as the prosperity of a jest in the ear of the hearer.
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