Introduction - Page 2

however rashly, committed his pledges thus
largely to the hazards of trading companies, it behoved him, of
course, to abide the consequences of his conduct, and, with
whatever feelings, he surrendered on the instant every shred of
property which he had been accustomed to call his own. It became
vested in the hands of gentlemen whose integrity, prudence, and
intelligence were combined with all possible liberality and
kindness of disposition, and who readily afforded every
assistance towards the execution of plans, in the success of
which the author contemplated the possibility of his ultimate
extrication, and which were of such a nature that, had assistance
of this sort been withheld, he could have had little prospect of
carrying them into effect. Among other resources which occurred
was the project of that complete and corrected edition of his
Novels and Romances (whose real parentage had of necessity been
disclosed at the moment of the commercial convulsions alluded
to), which has now advanced with unprecedented favour nearly to
its close; but as he purposed also to continue, for the behoof of
those to whom he was indebted, the exercise of his pen in the
same path of literature, so long as the taste of his countrymen
should seem to approve of his efforts, it appeared to him that it
would have been an idle piece of affectation to attempt getting
up a new incognito, after his original visor had been thus dashed
from his brow. Hence the personal narrative prefixed to the
first work of fiction which he put forth after the paternity of
the "Waverley Novels" had come to be publicly ascertained; and
though many of the particulars originally avowed in that Notice
have been unavoidably adverted to in the Prefaces and Notes to
some of the preceding volumes of the present collection, it is
now reprinted as it stood at the time, because some interest is
generally attached to a coin or medal struck on a special
occasion, as expressing, perhaps, more faithfully than the same
artist could have afterwards conveyed, the feelings of the moment
that gave it birth. The Introduction to the first series of
Chronicles of the Canongate ran, then, in these words:--

INTRODUCTION.

All who are acquainted with the early history of the Italian
stage are aware that Arlecchino is not, in his original
conception, a mere worker of marvels with his wooden sword, a
jumper in and out of windows, as upon our theatre, but, as his
party-coloured jacket implies, a buffoon or clown, whose mouth,
far from being eternally closed, as amongst us, is filled, like
that of Touchstone, with quips, and cranks, and witty devices,
very often delivered extempore. It is not easy to trace how he
became possessed of his