age must remain inviolate; they must be the same figures,
drawn by a better pencil, or to speak more modestly, executed in an age when the
principles of art were better understood. His language must not be exclusively
obsolete and unintelligible; but he should admit, if possible, no word or turn
of phraseology betraying an origin directly modern. It is one thing to make use
of the language and sentiments which are common to ourselves and our
forefathers, and it is another to invest them with the sentiments and dialect
exclusively proper to their descendants.
    This, my dear friend, I have found the most difficult part of my task; and,
to speak frankly, I hardly expect to satisfy your less partial judgment, and
more extensive knowledge of such subjects, since I have hardly been able to
please my own.
    I am conscious that I shall be found still more faulty in the tone of
keeping and costume, by those who may be disposed rigidly to examine my Tale,
with reference to the manners of the exact period in which my actors flourished:
It may be, that I have introduced little which can positively be termed modern;
but, on the other hand, it is extremely probable that I may have confused the
manners of two or three centuries, and introduced, during the reign of Richard
the First, circumstances appropriated to a period either considerably earlier,
or a good deal later than that era. It is my comfort, that errors of this kind
will escape the general class of readers, and that I may share in the
ill-deserved applause of those architects, who, in their modern Gothic, do not
hesitate to introduce, without rule or method, ornaments proper to different
styles and to different periods of the art. Those whose extensive researches
have given them the means of judging my backslidings with more severity, will
probably be lenient in proportion to their knowledge of the difficulty of my
task. My honest and neglected friend, Ingulphus, has furnished me with many a
valuable hint; but the light afforded by the Monk of Croyland, and Geoffrey de
Vinsauff, is dimmed by such a conglomeration of uninteresting and unintelligible
matter, that we gladly fly for relief to the delightful pages of the gallant
Froissart, although he flourished at a period so much more remote from the date
of my history. If, therefore, my dear friend, you have generosity enough to
pardon the presumptuous attempt to frame for myself a minstrel coronet, partly
out of the pearls of pure antiquity, and partly from the Bristol stones and
paste, with which I have endeavoured to imitate them, I am