Excerpt from Poor Miss. Finch: A Domestic Story IN expressing my acknowledgments for the favorable reception accorded to the previous edi tions of this story, I may take the present oppor tunity of adverting to one of the characters, not alluded to in the Letter of Dedication. The German oculist - Herr Grosse - has impressed himself so strongly as a real personage on the minds of some of my readers afflicted with blindness, or suffering from diseases of the eye, that I have received several written applications requesting me to communicate his present ad dress to patients desirous Of consulting him' Sincerely appreciating the testimony thus ren dered to the truth of this little study of charac ter, I have been obliged to acknowledge to my correspondents - and I may as well repeat it here - that Herr Grosse has no (individual) liv ing prototype. Like the other Persons of the Drama, in this book and in the books which have preceded it, he is drawn from my general Observation of humanity. I have always con sidered it to be a mistake in Art to limit the de lineation of character in fiction to a literary por trait taken from any one sitter. The result of this process is generally (to my mind) to pro duce a caricature instead of a character. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.