JUNIOR DEAN AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN ICIO NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 1923 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. жету PREFACE THE present collection of essays has been made in response to a request that students might have available in a single volume a representative selection of English prose from the early nineteenth century writers. These men in their time were the most accomplished masters of the essay as a special form of expression in prose, a form in which there have been many masters since, although none (be it said) who has surpassed or even equalled the high excellence reflected in at least a goodly number of the pieces here reproduced. They stand in the highest rank. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron (in his letters) wrote prose that is likely to last as long as any prose of its period, but its worth for the most part depends upon values other than those which have determined the collecting of the material for the present book. Carlyle's earliest essays fall within the pre-Victorian period, but Carlyle as a literary force is clearly one of the major Victorians. On some grounds Macaulay is also a Victorian, but his prose on the whole expresses the earlier rather than the later traditions. With very few exceptions the essays are complete wholes. One essay of Lamb's (On the Tragedies of Shakespeare), and two of Macaulay's (Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Boswell's Life of Johnson), have been slightly cut down by the omission of a few relatively unimportant paragraphs. In order to include anything from Macaulay's History (and the editor confesses that he felt impelled to include something), it was obviously necessary to make selections that are not separate units. As for De Quincey, who is not an essayist in the same sense as the others, since he is so longwinded and digressive, it has seemed wiser to make use of parts M of several of his best pieces than to put in one or two very long essays by themselves. By this treatment De Quincey suffers least and gains most. MADISON, WISCONSIN, August, 1922. F. W. R. |