I could not, and
I did not feel disposed to, appeal any further. If I had, how could I
tell that the second and third judgment would be more favourable than
the first? Then what would have been the result? No; I had nothing for
it but to wrap myself in my own integrity. By dint of resolution I
became invulnerable. I resolved to go on to the end, trusting as I could
to my own anticipations of the whole, and bidding the world wait its
time before it should be admitted to the consult.
I began my narrative, as is the more usual way, in the third person. But
I speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making
the hero of my tale his own historian; and in this mode I have persisted
in all my subsequent attempts at works of fiction. It was infinitely the
best adapted, at least, to my vein of delineation, where the thing in
which my imagination revelled the most freely was the analysis of the
private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical
dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive,
and recording the gradually accumulating impulses which led the
personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particular way of
proceeding in which they afterwards embarked.
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