But if, later, I became a frequent visitor of the well-established Roulette rooms patronized by the State, or of the lowly dens of the population of vice, if I analyzed, observed, caught passion in fragrante, surprised living expressions in the fire of action, then perhaps I might be permitted to paint a gambler more real and more human; and if, through the grace of a favourable God, my book will have a second edition, I must clearly rebuild my type from the observations and documents that I would have accumulated—exactly as, in a treatise on medicine, a practitioner would introduce in a second edition the last results of recent experiment.

When I first published O crime do Padre Amaro, I had but an incomplete knowledge of provincial Portugal, of bigoted lives, of the motives and ways of clerics. Later, through deliberate and methodical assiduousness, and perhaps keener observation, I simply rewrote my book from these new bases of analysis.

Does this mean that O crime do Padre Amaro, now published, gives absolutely, in their complex reality, the priest and the bigot, the canonical intrigue, the province of Portugal in this year of our Lord 1879? Oh! Surely not! The picture has sorry failures, sides of nature have been imperfectly studied, corners of the soul incompletely explored, details amplified and traits exaggerated. However, this is all the sum of observation and experience that I possess on this fragmentary element of Portuguese society. Let others now, more incisive and more skilled, set about this investigation again, certainly to attain a higher standard of reality.

Through such laborious observation of reality, such patient investigation of living matter, such Benedictine accumulation of notes and documents, are made durable and strong works. If my own are weak and ephemeral, it is because I have not been able to catch the truth with enough incisiveness, and it certainly does not follow that the method itself was not effective.