



Produced by Charles Bowen from page scans provided by
Google Books (University of Virginia)











Transcriber's Notes:
   1. Page scan source: Google Books
              https://books.google.com/books?id=hLFEAAAAYAAJ
     (University of Virginia)
   2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].






Mary _of_ Burgundy.

_By_
G. P. R. James


London
George Routledge
and Sons Limited.
MDCCCCIII.




_The Introduction is written by_ Laurie Magnus, M.A.;
_the Title-page is designed by_ Ivor I. J. Symes.






INTRODUCTION.


George Payne Rainsford James, Historiographer Royal to King William
IV., was born in London in the first year of the nineteenth century,
and died at Venice in 1860. His comparatively short life was
exceptionally full and active. He was historian, politician and
traveller, the reputed author of upwards of a hundred novels, the
compiler and editor of nearly half as many volumes of letters,
memoirs, and biographies, a poet and a pamphleteer, and, during the
last ten years of his life, British Consul successively in
Massachusetts, Norfolk (Virginia), and Venice. He was on terms of
friendship with most of the eminent men of his day. Scott, on whose
style he founded his own, encouraged him to persevere in his career as
a novelist; Washington Irving admired him, and Walter Savage Landor
composed an epitaph to his memory. He achieved the distinction of
being twice burlesqued, by Thackeray, and two columns are devoted to
an account of him in the new "Dictionary of National Biography." Each
generation follows its own gods, and G. P. R. James was, perhaps, too
prolific an author to maintain the popularity which made him "in some
ways the most successful novelist of his time