I am afraid that both in The Trail of the Sword, which was the forerunner
of The Seats of the Mighty, the well sunk, in a sense, out of which the
latter was drawn, I gave my Frenchman the advantage over his English
rival. In The Trail of the Sword, the gallant French adventurer's
chivalrous but somewhat merciless soul, makes a better picture than does
his more phlegmatic but brave and honourable antagonist, George Gering.
Also in The Seats of the Mighty, Doltaire, the half-villain, overshadows
the good English hero from first to last; and yet, despite the
unconscious partiality for the individual in both books, English
character and the English as a race, as a whole, are dominant in the
narrative.
There is a long letter, as a dedication to this book, addressed to my
father; there is a note also, which explains the spirit in which the book
was written, and I have no desire to enlarge this introduction in the
presence of these prefaces to the first edition. But I may say that this
book was gravely important to me, because it was to test all my capacity
for writing a novel with an historical background, and, as it were, in
the custom of a bygone time. It was not really the first attempt at
handling a theme belonging to past generations, because I had written for
Good Words, about the year 1890, a short novel which I called The Chief
Factor, a tale of the Hudson's Bay Company.
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