PREFACE.
The success of Harry Lorrequer was the reason for writing Charles O'Malley.
That I myself was in no wise prepared for the favor the public bestowed on, my first attempt is easily enough understood.

The ease with which I strung my stories together,--and in reality the Confessions of Harry Lorrequer are little other than a note-book of absurd and laughable incidents,--led me to believe that I could draw on this vein of composition without any limit whatever.

I felt, or thought I felt, an inexhaustible store of fun and buoyancy within me, and I began to have a misty, half-confused impression that Englishmen generally labored under a sad-colored temperament, took depressing views of life, and were proportionately grateful to any one who would rally them even passingly out of their despondency, and give them a laugh without much trouble for going in search of it.
When I set to work to write Charles O'Malley I was, as I have ever been, very low with fortune, and the success of a new venture was pretty much as eventful to me as the turn of the right color at _rouge-et-noir_.

At the same time I had then an amount of spring in my temperament, and a power of enjoying life which I can honestly say I never found surpassed.

The world had for me all the interest of an admirable comedy, in which the part allotted myself, if not a high or a foreground one, was eminently suited to my taste, and brought me, besides, sufficiently often on the stage to enable me to follow all the fortunes of the piece.