To contrive the successive incidents, by which
the respective individuals on whose characters they were to operate
should manifest their influence with adequate motives, and without
departing from actual life and nature, as we observe them in action
about us, was a task which required a very close study of the human mind
when placed in peculiar circumstances. In this case the great struggle
was between love and ambition. By ambition, I do not mean the ambition
of the truly great man, who wishes to associate it with truth and
virtue, and whose object is, in the first place, to gratify it by
elevating his country and his kind; no, but that most hateful species
of it which exists in the contrivance and working out of family
arrangements and insane projects for the aggrandizement of our
offspring, under circumstances where we must know that they cannot be
accomplished without wrecking the happiness of those to whom they are
proposed. Such a passion, in its darkest aspect--and in this I
have drawn it--has nothing more in view than the cruel, selfish
and undignified object of acquiring some poor and paltry title
or distinction for a son or daughter, without reference either to
inclination or will, and too frequently in opposition to both.
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