Excerpt from Liber Amoris

The Publishers avail themselves of an unexpected opportunity of printing from the original mss., by permission, the Lzber Anton}, eleven letters from Hazlitt to P. G. Patmore upon the subject, a letter from Sarah Walker to Hazlitt, the Diary of Mrs. Hazlitt in Scotland and five letters from that lady to her son and sister-in-law written between 1824 and I 83 I. In the text of the Liber Amen} many variations from the printed one of 182 3 occur; the correspondence with Patmore, as here given, constitutes the earliest attempt to exhibit it as it left the hands of the writer, since in those works, where it has been previously published or quoted, it either assumes the form of extracts, or is so out of harmony with the autograph letters themselves as to be often barely identifiable. A few letters appear elsewhere, which are not at present, and are not known ever to have been, among the Hazlitt Papers. On the other hand, one is now furnished for the first time from that source. It is to be suspected that the former printed versions were tampered with; at any rate, they are far from represent ing the original documents with fidelity, and the alterations and omissions are by no means always intelligible or judicious.

The volume now offered to the literary student, rather than to the general reader, has to be regarded as a repository of thegenuine material, so far as it survives, for arriving at a solution of a 'most extraordinary, most involved, and most painful episode in the career of one of the leading men of letters of the age immediately preceding our own. Several parallel or cognate cases have been cited; perhaps that which is best familiar is the amour of the Duke of Grafton with Parsons, and there is the additional resemblance or aflinity that she, like Sarah Walker, was a tailor's daughter.

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