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4 purposes. A terrified imagination, a sensitive nature, and a confusion of ideas that buries an act under a feeling, will render a man or woman, essentially good, temporarily a fiend.

When a long era, under apparently divine sanction, devotes itself to the cultivation of such excitable feelings, and associates them with supernatural agencies, the result must be, and always has been, to fill the world with virtuous frenzy that destroys all virtue but that of its own distorted character. Such was the age here depicted.

The chief personages are real; the inter-play of their associations, as herein set down, is such as most naturally arose out of their historical relation with each other. No false position, improbable sentiment, or excessive coloring has been adopted.

Real life, such as this book recalls, is more replete with records containing evidence of the good oppressed, sometimes rewarded, and the evil exalted and glorified, than can be presented by the fictitious annals of ingenious invention, however skillfully or elaborately drawn.

Bohemian history contains an accumulation of such historic memorials, and here is one.