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COURTEOUS READER,

The production that I now submit to you, proposes to represent the manners of the times, in various situations, but especially in literary departments. These are subjects with which I have been, and am, peculiarly conversant; and I trust the exhibition will be found fair and impartial, and also general, without any satirical allusion to individual characters.

Many are prepossessed with a notion, that a writer, who, in a fictitious story, describes the times, means particular persons, and not classes of persons. The only work of the kind that I ever produced, was exposed to this prejudice. In my Highlander, there was scarcely a