 weeping for the
loss of her beauty, and the gentleman »with hay-coloured whiskers and
straw-coloured hair,« are very smart, doubtless, and show a great knowledge of
the world. That she might, when on her knees, have been thinking of something
better than Miss Horrocks's ribbons, has possibly struck both of us. But my kind
reader will please to remember that this history has »Vanity Fair« for a title,
and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of
humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. And while the moralist, who is holding
forth on the cover (an accurate portrait of your humble servant), professes to
wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery in which
his congregation is arrayed; yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as
far as one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a shovel-hat; and a
deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course of such an undertaking.
    I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade, at Naples, preaching to a
pack of good-for-nothing honest lazy fellows by the sea-shore, work himself up
into such a rage and passion with some of the villains whose wicked deeds he was
describing and inventing, that the audience could not resist it; and they and
the poet together would burst out into a roar of oaths and execrations against
the fictitious monster of the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi
tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy.
    At the little Paris theatres, on the other hand, you will not only hear the
people yelling out »Ah gredin! Ah monstre!« and cursing the tyrant of the play
from the boxes; but the actors themselves positively refuse to play the wicked
parts, such as those of infâmes Anglais, brutal Cossacks, and what not, and
prefer to appear, at a smaller salary, in their real characters as loyal
Frenchmen. I set the two stories one against the other, so that you may see that
it is not from mere mercenary motives that the present performer is desirous to
show up and trounce his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred of them,
which he cannot keep down, and which must find a vent in suitable abuse and bad
language.
    I warn my »kyind friends,« then, that I am going to tell a story of
harrowing villainy and complicated - but, as I trust,
