English Essays (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from English Essays

Biographies of the essayists represented, exposition of the thought, and literary criticism have been excluded from the Notes, in the belief that such matters are better conveyed by histories of literature and by lectures. The Oxplanatory notes are perhaps fuller and more precise than some teachers will care for: These may be reminded of Hazlitt's remark about the allegory in The Faerie Queene; if one lets the notes alone, they won't bite him. In many cases the more precise form of statement has been used because it is more concise, as well as more valuable for reference; thus it takes less space to give the dates of a man's birth and death than to say that he lived in the latter part of such-and-such a century, but it does not follow that the student should be required to learn the exact dates. As to number of notes, I cannot be alone in my ex perience that most college undergraduates, in the earlier years of their course, are lamentably ignorant, not only of literature, but of history, biography, and art, and that if they are to understand what they read considerable annotation is necessary. Furthermore, although the text may often be intelligible, in a general way, without the reader's knowing the significance of an allusion or the source of a quotation, it may well be one of the secondary benefits of reading essays like those here contained that the student should widen. If only superficially and at second hand, his knowledge of the world of letters and men. I hope, however, that all teachers who use the book will urge their classes to read each essay through, at first, without looking at a note, in order to get the thought as a whole and the general effect; but also that they will then adopt the apostolic method of St. Philip, and put to the rider in these literary chariots that embarrassing but profitable question, Understandest thou what thou readest?

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