Excerpt from Lucretia, or the Children of the Night
Lucretia, or the Children of Night, was begun simultaneously with The Caxtons, a Family Picture. The two fictions were intended as pendants; both serving, amongst other collateral aims and objects, to show the influence of home education, - of early circumstance and example upon after character and conduct. Lucretia was completed and published before The Caxtons. The moral design of the first was misunderstood and assailed; that of the last was generally acknowledged and approved; the moral design in both was nevertheless precisely the same. But in one it was sought through the darker side of human nature, in the other, through the more sunny and cheerful - one shows the evil, the other the salutary influences of early circumstance and training. Necessarily, therefore, the first resorts to the tragic elements of awe and distress - the second to the comic elements of humour and agreeable emotion. These differences serve to explain the different reception that awaited the two, and may teach us how little the real conception of an author is known, and how little it is cared for: we judge - not by the purpose he conceives but according as the impressions he effects are pleasurable or painful. But while I cannot acquiesce in much of the hostile criticism this fiction produced at its first appearance, I readily allow that, as a mere question of art, the story might have been improved in itself, and rendered more acceptable to the reader, by diminishing the gloom of the catastrophe. In this edition I have endeavoured to do so; and the victim whose fate in the former cast of the work most revolted the reader, as a violation of the trite but amiable law of Poetical Justice, is saved from the hands of The Children of Night.
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