ABSTRACT
Such was the narrative of lord Danvers. I do not pretend to have put it down in his exact words. That every one will readily acknowledge to have been impossible. I feel that I have sometimes taken the liberty to interweave with it circumstances, that were not fully known to me till afterwards. It was scarcely in my power to do otherwise. I have given lord Danvers’s narrative in the first person: without doing so I should scarcely have been able to introduce the language in which he described his feelings of compunction and remorse; and in this it has been my desire to be faithful and minute. After this it would have had a wretched / effect, if I had been scrupulous to separate what I learned from his lordship’s lips, from the things respecting which my information was subsequently more complete; and thus to have formed two narratives, coincident in point of time, and separated only in the sources from which I received them. I have not therefore attempted to observe so barren a punctilio. a Let the reader be satisfied that the story is substantially true. I have not consciously narrated one circumstance, or given words to one thought, that does not truly make a part of this memorable story.
