Clarence Or A Tale of Our Own Times Author:Catharine Maria Sedgwick Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. A remark of Johnson's, based on a moan quality in human nature, is not true of my countrymen; they do Not rate a fiving writer by ... more »his poorest production. On the contrary, they have perhaps an undue partiality for native living writers, and therefore, I hope they will not think me guilty of presumption, or temerity, in republishing old works, forgotten perhaps by most of their readers. I am aware that novels are, for the most part, entitled only to an ephemeral interest, and that the amount which mine were so fortunate as to obtain at their first publication, was owing to the fact that but a few fellow-workers divided the favor of my countrymen with me. Since the " New-England Tale," my first unaspiring production, appeared, many gifted native writers have enriched our romantic literature. A new mine has been opened in the north. Frederika Bremer has electrified us With a series of works that have the richness, and raciness of European literature, and the purity, and healthfulness of our own. Other northern lights have shone upon us. Almost every weekly steamer brings us from England a new novel, X. PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. written by some man or woman of genius ; and France sends out by scores romances, to stimulate anew the wearied and sated appetite, r— I certainly do not expect that my home and artless products, can compete with these rich foreign fabrics. If they have no intrinsic and independent merit, they certainly are not worth republication, but if they have, it is an incident in their favor, that they relate to our own history and condition, while the English novels illustrate a very different stage of civilization from ours; and the French romances portray that which we trust ours will never reach. Of the first we may say "...« less