PREFACE. EVERAL of the Essays which are here collected and reprinted have had the good or bad fortune to be much criticised at the time of their first appearance. I am not now going to inflict upon the reader a reply to those criticisms; for one or two explanations which are desirable I shall elsewhere, perhaps, be able some day to find an opportunity; but, indeed, it is not in my nature,- some of my critics would not in my power, to dispute on behalf of rather say, any opinion, even my own, very obstinately. To try and approach Truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, not to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will, it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline. He who will do nothing but fight impetuously towards her on his own, one, favorite, particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped. I am very sensible that this way of thinking leaves me under great disadvantages in addressing a public composed from a people "the most logical," says the Saturday Review," in the whole world." But the truth is, I have never been able to hit it off happily with the logicians, and it would be mere affectation in me to give myself the airs of doing so. They imagine truth something to be proved, I something to be seen; they something to be manufactured, I as something to be found. I have a profound respect for intuitions, and a very lukewarm respect for the elaborate machine-work of my friends the logicians. I have always thought that all which was worth much in this elaborate machine-work of theirs came from an intuition, to which they gave a grand name of their own. How did they come by this intuition? Ah! if they could tell us that. But no; they set their machine in motion, and build up a fine showy edifice, glittering and unsubstantial like a pyramid of eggs; and then they say; "Come and look at our pyramid." And what does one find it? Of all that heap of eggs, the one poor little fresh egg, the original intuition, has got hidden away far out of sight and forgotten. And all the other eggs are addled. So it is not to build rival pyramids against my logical enemies that I write this preface, but to prevent a misunderstanding, of which certain phrases that some of them use make me apprehensive. Mr. Wright, one of the many translators of Homer, has just published a Letter to the Dean of Canterbury, complaining of some remarks of mine, uttered now a long while ago, on his version of the Iliad. One cannot be always studying one's own works, and I was really under the impression, till I saw Mr. Wright's complaint, that I had spoken of him with all respect. The reader may judge of my astonishment, therefore, at finding, from Mr. Wright's pamphlet, that I had "declared with much solemnity that there is not any proper reason for his existing." That I never said; but, on looking back at my Lectures on translating Homer, I find that I did say, not that Mr. Wright, but that Mr. Wright's version of the Iliad, repeating in the main the merits and defects of Cowper's version, as Mr. Sotheby's repeated those of Pope's version, had, if I might be pardoned for saying so, no proper reason for existing. Elsewhere I expressly spoke of the merit of his version; but I confess that the phrase, qualified as I have shown, about its want of a proper reason for existing, I used. Well, the phrase had, perhaps, too much vivacity: alas! vivacity is one of those faults which advancing years will only too certainly cure; that, however, is no real excuse; we have all of us a right to exist, we and our works; an unpopular author should be the last person to call in question this right. So I gladly withdraw the offending phrase, and I am sorry for having used it; Mr. Wright, however, will allow me to observe that he has taken an ample revenge. He has held me up before the public as "condemned by my own umpire"; as rebutted," and "with an extinguisher put upon me" by Mr. Tennyson's remarkable pentameter, "When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon?" 66 (till I read Mr. Wright I had no notion, I protest, that this exquisite stroke of pleasantry was aimed at me); he has exhibited me as "condemned by myself, refuted by myself," and, finally, my hexameters having been rejected by all the world, "somewhat crestfallen." And he has himself made game of me, in this forlorn condition, by parodying those unlucky hexameters. So that now, I should think, he must be quite happy. Partly, no doubt, from being crestfallen, but partly, too, from sincere contrition for that fault of over-vivacity a* which I have acknowledged, I will not raise a finger in self-defence against Mr. Wright's blows. I will not even ask him, what it almost irresistibly rises to my lips to ask him when I see he writes from Mapperly, - if he can tell me what has become of that poor girl, Wragg? She has been tried, I suppose: I know how merciful a view judges and juries are apt to take of these cases, so I cannot but hope she has got off. But what I should so like to ask is, whether the impression the poor thing made was, in general, satisfactory: did she come up to the right standard as a member of "the best breed in the whole world"? were her life-experiences an edifying testimony to "our unrivalled happiness"? did she find Mr. Roebuck's speech a comfort to her in her prison? But I must stop; or my kind monitor, the Guardian, whose own gravity is so profound that the frivolous are sometimes apt to give it a heavier name, will be putting a harsh construction upon my innocent thirst for knowledge, and again taxing me with the unpardonable crime of being amusing. Amusing, good heavens! we shall none of us be amusing much longer. Mr. Wright would perhaps be more indulgent to my vivacity if he considered this. It is but the last sparkle of flame before we are all in the dark; the last glimpse of color before we all go into drab. Who that reads the Examiner does not know that representative man, that Ajax of liberalism, one of our modern leaders of thought, who signs himself "Presbyter Anglicanus"? For my part, I have good cause to know him; terribly severe he was with me two years ago, when he thought I had spoken with levity of that favorite pontiff of the Philistines, the Bishop of Natal. But his masterpiece was the other day. Mr. Disraeli, in the course of |