I must own that I have but inadequately struggled against the great and obvious difficulty of representing an author living in our own times, with whose supposed works or alleged genius and those of anyone actually existing, the reader can establish no identification, and he is therefore either compelled constantly to humor the delusion by keeping his imagination on the stretch, or lazily driven to confound the Author IN the Book with the Author OF the Book. But I own, also, I fancied, while aware of this objection, and in spite of it, that so much not hitherto said might be conveyed with advantage through the lips or in the life of an imaginary writer of our own time, that I was contented, on the whole, either to task the imagination, or submit to the suspicions of the reader. All that my own egotism appropriates in the book are some occasional remarks, the natural result of practical experience. With the life or the character, the adventures or the humors, the errors or the good qualities, of Maltravers himself, I have nothing to do, except as the narrator and inventor. -- EDWARD GEORGE BULWER-LYTTON