PREFATORY

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Suggested by one friend and selected and compiled by another, this volume is less a book than a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism. Thus, the notes on Longfellow, Balzac, Sidney, Tourneur, ‘Arabian Nights Entertainments,’ Borrow, George Eliot, and Mr. Frederick Locker are extracted from originals inLondon’—a print still remembered with affection by those concerned in it; those on Labiche, Champfleury, Richardson, Fielding, Byron, Gay, Congreve, Boswell, ‘Essays and Essayists,’ Jefferies, Hood, Matthew Arnold, Lever, Thackeray, Dickens, M. ThÉodore de Banville, Mr. Austin Dobson, and Mr. George Meredith from articles contributed toThe AthenÆum’; those on Dumas, Count TolstoÏ’s novels, and the verse of Dr. Hake fromThe Saturday Review’; those on Walton, Landor, and Heine fromThe Scots Observer,’ ‘The Academy,’ andVanity Fairrespectively; while theDisraelihas been pieced together fromLondon,’ ‘Vanity Fair,’ andThe AthenÆum’; theBerliozfromThe Scots Observerand The Saturday Review’; theTennysonfromThe Scots ObserverandThe Magazine of Art’; theHomer and TheocritusfromVanity Fairand the defunctTeacher’; theHugofromThe AthenÆum,’ ‘The Magazine of Art,’ and an unpublished fragment written forThe Scottish Church.’ In all cases permission to reprint is hereby gratefully acknowledged; but the reprinted matter has been subjected to such a process of revision and reconstitution that much of it is practically new, while little or none remains as it was. I venture, then, to hope that the result, for all its scrappiness, will be found to have that unity which comes of method and an honest regard for letters.

W. E. H.

Edinr. 8th May 1890

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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