With the exception of the last three sketches, the pieces composing these two volumes were written during the author's confinement, for "conspiracy," in Stafford gaol, merely, as a relief from the intenser thought exercised in the composition of his "Prison-Rhyme,"—"The Purgatory of Suicides,"—already published. Higher merit than naturalness combined with truth is not claimed for any of the stories: they are, simply, such as any man may write who has the least power of pourtraying the images which human life, in some of its humblest, least disguised forms, has impressed on his memory,—while the heart has formed no attachment sufficiently powerful to seduce the judgment into a decision, that it is either wise or honest to hide these images from the observance of others. Nearly all the homely characters sketched are real,—some of them, in their very names; and the few adventures allotted to them, are devoid of romance and intricacy, because they seldom exceed fact.

The "Old Lincolnshire," so often mentioned in these simple pieces, and endeared to the writer of them by the associations of thirty years of his life, is likely soon to disappear before the social changes of that New Lincolnshire which railway "civilisation" will summon into existence:—would that the manufacturing-misery of the modern Leicestershire, outlined in two or three uncoloured and painfully-veritable pictures, might, as speedily, evanish!

Of the three concluding sketches, the writer feels it right to state that the first is merely a slight alteration of a series of paragraphs furnished to the Stamford Mercury, in 1838, and records strict facts which were then occurring in Lincolnshire; while the two remaining fragments were intended to form parts of a novel, in some degree autobiographical,—but the completion of which was relinquished, at first, from a toilful engagement with the sterner business of life, and at length from a growing preference for other subjects.

134, Blackfriars' Road,
London, Nov. 1. 1845.