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 butted," and "with an extinguisher put upon me" by Mr. Tennyson's remarkable pentameter,

"When did a frog coarser croak upon our Helicon?"

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(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

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

his lively speech at Oxford, talked of "nebulous professors, who, if they could only succeed in obtaining a perpetual study of their writings, would go far to realize that eternity of punishment which they object to." "Presbyter Anglicanus" says "it would be childish to affect ignorance" that this was aimed at Mr. Maurice. If it was, who can doubt that Mr. Maurice himself, full of culture and urbanity as he is, would be the first to pronounce it a very smart saying, and to laugh at it good-humoredly? But only listen to Mr. Maurice's champion:

"This passage must fill all sober-minded men with astonishment and dismay; they will regard it as one of the most ominous signs of the time. This contemptible joke, which betrays a spirit of ribald profanity not easily surpassed, excited from the Bishop, the clergy, and laity present, not an indignant rebuke, but 'continued laughter.' Such was the assembly of Englishmen and Christians, who could listen in uproarious merriment to a Parliamentary leader while he asserted that the vilest iniquity would be well compensated by a forced perusal of the writings of Frederick Denison Maurice!"

And, for fear this trumpet-blast should not be carried far enough by the Examiner, its author, if I am not greatly mistaken, blew it also, under a different name, in half a dozen of the daily newspapers. As Wordsworth asks: "... the happiest mood

Of that man's mind, what can it be? . . ."

was he really born of human parents, or of Hyrcanian tigers? if the former, surely to some of his remote ancestors, at any rate, - in far distant ages, I mean, long some conception of a

before the birth of Puritanism, joke must, at one moment or other of their lives, have been conveyed. But there is the coming east wind! there

is the tone of the future!—I hope it is grave enough for even the Guardian; — the earnest, prosaic, practical, austerely literal future! Yes, the world will soon be the Philistines'; and then, with every voice, not of thunder, silenced, and the whole earth filled and ennobled every morning by the magnificent roaring of the young lions of the Daily Telegraph, we shall all yawn in one another's faces with the dismallest, the most unimpeachable gravity. No more vivacity then! my hexameters, and dogmatism, and scoffs at the Divorce Court, will all have been put down; I shall be quite crestfallen. But does Mr. Wright imagine that there will be any more place, in that world, for his heroic blank verse Homer than for my paradoxes? If he does, he deceives himself, and knows little of the Palatine Library of the future. A plain edifice, like the British College of Health enlarged inside, a light, bleak room, with a few statues ; Dagon in the centre, with our English Caabah, or Palladium of enlightenment, the hare's stomach; around, a few leading friends of humanity or fathers of British philosophy;- Goliath, the great Bentham, "Presbyter Anglicanus," our intellectual deliverer Mr. James Clay, and ... yes! with the embarrassed air of a late convert, the editor of the Saturday Review. Many a shrewd nip has he in old days given to the Philistines, this editor; many a bad half-hour has he made them pass; but in his old age he has mended his courses, and declares that his heart has always been in the right place, and that he is at bottom, however appearances may have been against him, stanch for Goliath and "the most logical nation in the whole world." Then, for the book-shelves. There will be found on them a monograph by Mr. Lowe on the literature of the ancient Scythians, to revenge them for the