So, upon a magnificent _tableau_, slowly falls the lawny curtain.
Patient reader, what think you of my long-winded tragedy?
No quibbling about Nero having really died in a drain, four years after the murder of Aggrippina; no learned disquisitions, if you please, as to his innocence of Rome's fire, a counterpart to our slander on the Papacy in the matter of London's; spare me, I pray you, learned pundit, your suspicions about Galba's too probable _alibi_ in Spain.

Tell me rather this: do I falsify history in any thing more important than mere accidental anachronisms and anatopisms?
do I make an untrue delineation of character, blackening the good, or white-washing the wicked?
Do I not, by introducing Nero's three greatest crimes so near upon his assassination, merely accelerate the interval between causes and effect?
And is not tragic dignity justified in varnishing, with other compost than the dregs of Rome, the exit of the last true Caesar of the Augustan family?
For all the rest, good manager, provide me actors, and I am even now uncertain--such is my weakness--whether this skeleton might not at some time be clad with flesh and skin, and a decent Roman toga.

I fear it will yet haunt me as a '_Midsummer Night's Dream_,' destroying my quiet with involuntary shreds and patches of long-metred blank; the notion is still vivacious, albeit scotched: Alexandrine though the synopsis appear, it must not be thrown on the highroad as a dead snake; nay, let me cherish it yet on my hearth, and not hurl it away like a _bonum waviatum_; a little more boiling up of Roman messes in my brain, and my tragedy might flow forth spontaneously as lava.

What if this book be, after all, a sort of pilot-balloon, to show my huge Nassau the way the wind blows--a feeler as to which and which may please?
Whether or not this be so, I will still confess on, emptying my brain of booklets, and, if by happy possibility I can keep my secret, shall hear unsuspected, friend, _your_ verdict.
* * * * * I must rather hope, than expect, that my next bit of possible authorship is not like the last, a subject forestalled.

Scribbling as I find myself for very listlessness in a dull country-house, there's not a publisher's index within thirty miles; so, for lack of evidence to the contrary, I may legitimately, for at least a brief period of self-delusion, imagine the intoxicating field my own.