The greater part of the following matter has already appeared in various periodicals—the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary Review, the Speaker, the Chord, the New York Musical Courier, the Atlantic Monthly, the Weekly Critical Review, the Monthly Musical Record, and the Daily Mail. All have been greatly altered, however—some practically rewritten. The larger articles—those on Programme Music, Strauss, and Berlioz—have been made up from sundry articles that appeared at different times and in different journals; any one who has tried to weld heterogeneous material of this kind into one mass will appreciate the difficulty of the work, and will, I trust, make allowances for whatever awkwardness of form the essays may show here and there.

I must apologise for the fact that occasionally one essay touches slightly upon ground that has already been more fully treated in another. It sometimes happens that two quite different lines of thought, starting from widely separated points, will converge and meet; or, on the other hand, that the one Æsthetic principle will prove applicable to different phenomena. I am conscious of this occasional overlapping in the essays, but there seemed no way of avoiding it; if an argument was to have its proper force it had to be given in full, even if for a page or so it duplicated what had already been said elsewhere.

My thanks are due to the Editors of the journals I have named for their permission to reprint.

E. N.