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BY
TO
Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so
illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write
without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne,
Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, De Quincey, and
Walter Pater,--to name the first that come to mind. Others are alive, and
though perhaps as illustrious in their own way, are less formidable for
that very reason. I am specially indebted to Mr C.P. Sanger, without
whose knowledge of the law of real property this book could never have
been written. Mr Sydney-Turner's wide and peculiar erudition has saved
me, I hope, some lamentable blunders. I have had the advantage--how great
I alone can estimate--of Mr Arthur Waley's knowledge of Chinese. Madame
Lopokova (Mrs J.M. Keynes) has been at hand to correct my Russian. To the
unrivalled sympathy and imagination of Mr Roger Fry I owe whatever
understanding of the art of painting I may possess. I have, I hope,
profited in another department by the singularly penetrating, if severe,
criticism of my nephew Mr Julian Bell. Miss M.K. Snowdon's indefatigable
researches in the archives of Harrogate and Cheltenham were none the less
arduous for being vain. Other friends have helped me in ways too various
to specify. I must content myself with naming Mr Angus Davidson; Mrs
Cartwright; Miss Janet Case; Lord Berners (whose knowledge of Elizabethan
music has proved invaluable); Mr Francis Birrell; my brother, Dr Adrian
Stephen; Mr F.L. Lucas; Mr and Mrs Desmond Maccarthy; that most
inspiriting of critics, my brother-in-law, Mr Clive Bell; Mr G.H.
Rylands; Lady Colefax; Miss Nellie Boxall; Mr J.M. Keynes; Mr Hugh
Walpole; Miss Violet Dickinson; the Hon. Edward Sackville West; Mr and
Mrs St. John Hutchinson; Mr Duncan Grant; Mr and Mrs Stephen Tomlin; Mr
and Lady Ottoline Morrell; my mother-in-law, Mrs Sydney Woolf; Mr Osbert
Sitwell; Madame Jacques Raverat; Colonel Cory Bell; Miss Valerie Taylor;
Mr J.T. Sheppard; Mr and Mrs T.S. Eliot; Miss Ethel Sands; Miss Nan
Hudson; my nephew Mr Quentin Bell (an old and valued collaborator in
fiction); Mr Raymond Mortimer; Lady Gerald Wellesley; Mr Lytton Strachey;
the Viscountess Cecil; Miss Hope Mirrlees; Mr E.M. Forster; the Hon.
Harold Nicolson; and my sister, Vanessa Bell--but the list threatens to
grow too long and is already far too distinguished. For while it rouses
in me memories of the pleasantest kind it will inevitably wake
expectations in the reader which the book itself can only disappoint.
Therefore I will conclude by thanking the officials of the British Museum
and Record Office for their wonted courtesy; my niece Miss Angelica Bell,
for a service which none but she could have rendered; and my husband for
the patience with which he has invariably helped my researches and for
the profound historical knowledge to which these pages owe whatever
degree of accuracy they may attain. Finally, I would thank, had I not
lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and
gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the
geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope,
not spare his services on the present occasion.