Mary Elizabeth Moragne Davis

The British Partizan Mary Elizabeth Moragne Davis

NOTE TO THE READER: This is the LARGE PRINT EDITION of The British Partizan. THE following beautiful Novelette appeared originally in the pages of the "Augusta Mirror," a literary periodical published in Augusta, Georgia, some twenty-five years ago, and for which it was written by its gifted author, a young lady of South Carolina, in competition for a prize offered by the publisher for the best romance founded on incidents in the revolutionary history of Georgia and South Carolina: Through the medium of the "Mirror," it acquired a popularity at the time only limited by the circulation of that periodical, and what was remarkable in that day of our literary as well as commercial, if not political, vassalage to the North, it elicited the most flattering encomiums from the Northern literary journals--the "Knickerbocker" declaring that it approached more nearly to the style and genius of Sir WALTER SCOTT, than any novel that had yet been written this side of the Atlantic. To meet the demand for the story an edition was printed in book form, only a small portion of which, however, reached the public, the greater part of the edition having been destroyed while in sheets by the flood which inundated Augusta in 1840. Circumstances prevented the publication of a second edition of the book, and in a few years the "BRITISH PARTIZAN," at first so much sought for, had passed out of print, and in time out of the memory of the public. In reproducing it now from the pages of perhaps the only copy of the "Mirror" extant, the publishers are actuated not less by a high appreciation of its literary merits, than by the belief that it is a story peculiarly suited to the times in which we live. It is a tale of true love, wrought out amid the stirring scenes and harsh vicissitudes of partizan strife, in which the actors are the representatives of real characters, whose aspirations and passions, whose virtues and vices, trials and sufferings, triumphs and misfortunes, are developed and portrayed in an ideal history of intense dramatic interest.