The Caxtons

Caxtons, The

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Title: The Caxtons, Complete
Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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THE CAXTONS (Complete)
A FAMILY PICTURE
By Edward Bulwer Lytton (Lord Lytton)

PREFACE.
If it be the good fortune of this work to possess any interest for the
Novel reader, that interest, perhaps, will be but little derived from the
customary elements of fiction. The plot is extremely slight, the
incidents are few, and with the exception of those which involve the
fate of Vivian, such as may be found in the records of ordinary life.
Regarded as a Novel, this attempt is an experiment somewhat apart
from the previous works of the author. It is the first of his writings in
which Humor has been employed, less for the purpose of satire than in
illustration of amiable characters; it is the first, too, in which man has
been viewed, less in his active relations with the world, than in his
repose at his own hearth,--in a word, the greater part of the canvas has
been devoted to the completion of a simple Family Picture. And thus,

in any appeal to the sympathies of the human heart, the common
household affections occupy the place of those livelier or larger
passions which usually (and not unjustly) arrogate the foreground in
Romantic composition.
In the Hero whose autobiography connects the different characters and
events of the work, it has been the Author's intention to imply the
influences of Home upon the conduct and career of youth; and in the
ambition which estranges Pisistratus for a time from the sedentary
occupations in which the man of civilized life must usually serve his
apprenticeship to Fortune or to Fame, it is not designed to describe the
fever of Genius conscious of superior powers and aspiring to high
destinies, but the natural tendencies of a fresh and buoyant mind, rather
vigorous than contemplative, and in which the desire of action is but
the symptom of health.
Pisistratus in this respect (as he himself feels and implies) becomes the
specimen or type of a class the numbers of which are daily increasing
in the inevitable progress of modern civilization. He is one too many in
the midst of the crowd; he is the representative of the exuberant
energies of youth, turning, as with the instinct of nature for space and
development, from the Old World to the New. That which may be
called the interior meaning of the whole is sought to be completed by
the inference that, whatever our wanderings, our happiness will always
be found within a narrow compass, and amidst the objects more
immediately within our reach, but that we are seldom sensible of this
truth (hackneyed though it be in the Schools of all Philosophies) till our
researches have spread over a wider area. To insure the blessing of
repose, we require a brisker excitement than a few turns up and down
our room. Content is like that humor in the crystal, on which Claudian
has lavished the wonder of a child and the fancies of a Poet,--
"Vivis gemma tumescit aquis."
E. B. L.
October, 1849.

THE CAXTONS.


PART I.


CHAPTER I.
"Sir--sir, it is a boy!"
"A boy," said my father, looking up from his book, and evidently much
puzzled: "what is a boy?"
Now my father did not mean by that interrogatory to challenge
philosophical inquiry, nor to demand of the honest but unenlightened
woman who had just rushed into his study, a solution of that mystery,
physiological