PREFACE THE principle upon which the essays in this volume were selected stands in need not so much of explanation as of justification. Most of them were favorites with our grandfathers, but make little bid for easy popularity with our sons. For they are very largely "classics"; and the colleges that base their freshman study of English prose on such are none too numerous; the students that turn to them instinctively for pleasure or inspiration relatively few. Institutions seem to prefer essays and writers that are concerned with the immediate world about them before the work of the "great dead." And they may, of course, be right. It would almost seem, indeed, so many are the volumes of selected essays concerned with current affairs, as if the old had been tried and found wanting by the new. The movement of the past ten years towards the reading and discussion in college classes of essays on university and national problems, and of contemporary essays on miscellaneous matters, has been extensive. Its aim has been, I take it, to furnish interesting material that would foster and quicken discussion. In this it has been successful, for students are stimulated by a fresh presentation of ideas tangent to their experience, and readily respond. The use of such material is often an alleviation for rigorous handbooks and rhetorics, for themes and stiff-backed calendars. More than that, of course. On a higher plane the movement has elements of justification in the excellence of the material chosen; almost without excep tion the volumes present essays that are admirably written and clearly developed. But in that the tendency of the movement has been to ignore the work of the great stylists, of those who lie at the center of English prose, its final value is questionable. It cannot be that the classics have outlived service. The quick as well as the dead must still be capable of feeling their power. They are not their own cemetery. I dare say the time has gone by when youth will spontaneously turn to Ruskin and Carlyle and rise to enthusiasm in their company-other times, other customs-but they and their peers had in them the power to say great things greatly. It can be admitted cheerfully that our finest essayists cannot be read as one runs; the sense they show for history, for criticism, for political economy may be perverse or opinionated; the times of which they write alien in innumerable ways from our own. But the mirror of men's thoughts and emotions gives back the same images from age to age. The fine old saying that customs and manners may veer to the opposite, but human nature never changes, holds true, and most of these writers concern themselves with the permanent in human nature. It almost seems like rejecting the best that has been said and thought in the world to turn from them. There are, however, two other main reasons for refusing to give them up. One of these has to do with style, an elusive element where Sir Thomas Browne or Walter Pater is concerned, but obvious enough and compelling― even for freshmen-with the majority of our classic writers. One is rather unwilling to leave any course in composition without imparting some knowledge of the manner in which the greatest and best have said the finest things. The ranges of English prose style are wide be |