Excerpt from The Foster-Brother: A Tale of the War of Chiozza

This novel being the production of a writer whose name has hitherto scarcely transpired, the publisher is of opinion, that ail introduction of it to the public by one who has been longer before them, may serve to procure it the speedier attention.

Thinking what I do of its merits, and the writer being one of my sons, the reader will conceive how willingly I have fallen in with a suggestion having such an object; though at the same time I must own that I felt myself to be in a delicate position, with regard both to the needlessness of my good word in the long run, and the suspicions to which fatherly commendations are liable. In reflecting, however, that my introduction is of necessity addressed chiefly to critical readers, I concluded that they would give me their best construction. Assuredly the new writer neither expected any such recommendation, nor intended, in the first instance, to have his name disclosed. He is not. indeed, a new writer at all, except as far as regards this class of composition, and the involuntary appearance of the name. He has written anonymously for several years, with the approbation of the best judges in the metropolis; and (to make use, in all modesty, of a saying of Johnson's respecting Goldsmith) has no more necessity, with those that know him, of coming to me for help, in any one respect, than he has to be "fed with a spoon." Still he does not hold himself superior to the pleasure or the advantage of having his father's good opinion.

I confess I think so well of the "Foster Brother," that I do not hesitate to mention a circumstance which might otherwise have told against it; at least with such as are accustomed to confound rapidity of execution with badness of it; and this is, hat it was composed at hasty, though earnest intervals, during a pressure of work already too much for the writer's health, and only carried to that extreme from a sense of duty.

I am much mistaken, if the habit of a principle of this kind will not be recognized by the reader as originating some of the best things in the book; which, to sum up my general idea of them (for I am sensible that it does not become me to enter much into particulars) appears to me to consist of the heartiest male characters, such as Zeno, Luigi II Grasso, and the Englishman; of the highly graphic nature of the descriptions, whether of scenes or persons, executed with all the breadth as well as minuteness of a painter, and above all, of the development of the graver elements of the passion of love, truly so called; that is to say, love founded on real of supposed goodness in the object, felt in proportion to the existence of the like worthiness in the person loving, and superior to all the chances, whether conventional or otherwise, of being confounded with what it is not.

I cannot conceive anything finer or more complete in this way, than the characters of Arduino's daughter and Morosini's son, of the younger Carrara, and the noble peasant girl Rosa Bardossi, my (I beg leave to say) favorite. All the scenes in which the affections of these individuals are concerned, I hold to be masterpieces; and no less such, of another kind, is the conveyance of the Venetian ship to the Greek island, by the undaunted Englishman.

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