thrilled through many a bosom; and George Ellis could transfer
all the playful fascination of a humour, as delightful as it was
uncommon, into his Abridgement of the Ancient Metrical Romances.
So that, however I may have occasion to rue my present audacity,
I have at least the most respectable precedents in my favour.

Still the severer antiquary may think, that, by thus
intermingling fiction with truth, I am polluting the well of
history with modern inventions, and impressing upon the rising
generation false ideas of the age which I describe. I cannot but
in some sense admit the force of this reasoning, which I yet hope
to traverse by the following considerations.

It is true, that I neither can, nor do pretend, to the
observation of complete accuracy, even in matters of outward
costume, much less in the more important points of language and
manners. But the same motive which prevents my writing the
dialogue of the piece in Anglo-Saxon or in Norman-French, and
which prohibits my sending forth to the public this essay printed
with the types of Caxton or Wynken de Worde, prevents my
attempting to confine myself within the limits of the period in
which my story is laid. It is necessary, for exciting interest
of any kind, that the subject assumed should be, as it were,
translated into the manners, as well as the language, of the age
we live in. No fascination has ever been attached to Oriental
literature, equal to that produced by Mr Galland's first
translation of the Arabian Tales; in which, retaining on the one
hand the splendour of Eastern costume, and on the other the
wildness of Eastern fiction, he mixed these with just so much
ordinary feeling and expression, as rendered them interesting and