Page:Essays and criticisms by Wainewright (1880).djvu/10

vi The result of my researches, however, is given in the following pages, and, on the whole, I have added a good deal to the knowledge of Wainewright's youth, parentage, and personal connexions. On one or two points relevant to his biography I have been obliged by private considerations to be a little less copious than I can, to borrow the American phrase. But no essentials have been sacrificed.

The attempt to make something of the case appeared to be warranted by the uniqueness of the circumstances. The story presents itself to my mind as a curiosity of literature far more striking, and far more isolated in its characteristics, than anything to be found in the pages of Disraeli the elder.

When we look at the man's origin, his antecedents, his association with letters and literary men, his antiquarian tastes and artistic accomplishments, and with all these things contrast the painful and vicious passages of his maturer life, it brings before us a history almost unparalleled in its singularity and sadness.

The late Mr. Walter Thornbury, in his "Old Stories Re-told," 1870, has formed out of Wainewright's contributions to the London Magazine, assisted by the ordinary sources of intelligence, a smartly written, but flimsy abridgment of this case. The republication at large of the papers in the Magazine, accompanied by as accurate and complete a version of the whole affair as I could collect from extant or accessible materials, appeared