In preparing to compose a fiction founded on history, the writer ofthese pages thought it no necessary requisite of such a work that theprincipal characters appearing in it should be drawn from thehistorical personages of the period. On the contrary, he felt thatsome very weighty objections attached to this plan of composition. Heknew well that it obliged a writer to add largely from invention towhat was actually known—to fill in with the colouring of romanticfancy the bare outline of historic fact—and thus to place thenovelist's fiction in what he could not but consider most unfavourablecontrast to the historian's truth. He was further by no meansconvinced that any story in which historical characters supplied themain agents, could be preserved in its fit unity of design andrestrained within its due limits of development, without somefalsification or confusion of historical dates—a species of poeticallicence of which he felt no disposition to avail himself, as it was hismain anxiety to make his plot invariably arise and proceed out of thegreat events of the era exactly in the order in which they occurred.
Influenced, therefore, by these considerations, he thought that byforming all his principal characters from imagination, he should beable to mould them as he pleased to the main necessities of the story;to display them, without any impropriety, as influenced in whatevermanner appeared most strikingly interesting by its minor incidents; andfurther, to make them, on all occasions, without trammel or hindrance,the practical exponents of the spirit of the age, of all the varioushistorical illustrations of the period, which the Author's researchesamong conflicting but equally important authorities had enabled him togarner up, while, at the same time, the appearance of verisimilitudenecessary to an historical romance might, he imagined, be successfullypreserved by the occasional introduction of the living characters ofthe era, in those portions of the plot comprising events with whichthey had been remarkably connected.
On this plan the recent work has been produced.
To the fictitious characters alone is committed the task ofrepresenting the spirit of the age. The Roman emperor, Honorius, andthe Gothic king, Alaric, mix but little personally in the business ofthe story—only appearing in such events, and acting under suchcircumstances, as the records of history strictly authorise; but exacttruth in respect to time, place, and circumstance is observed in everyhistorical event introduced in the plot, from the period of the marchof the Gothic invaders over the Alps to the close of the firstbarbarian blockade of Rome.