NOTE

I recall old Professor Child urging on me in my college days "writing for bread," and saying I should remember "not all is for immortality, in literature there are things that are meant to die, just as there are beasts and birds in nature," words that often recurred to me while compiling this volume. It is a selection from a mass of contributions to the old Nation and the old Atlantic of my early years, like my first book of criticism (1890); and, to quote the preface of that volume (what is also true of the other reprints of this edition), the papers are given with "little more revision than was necessary to cover unimportant omissions, or to combine, in one or two instances, kindred articles." These papers, however, though "very young" in one sense, and "very old" in another, fairly illustrate the working of what is coming to be called the "old, literary education" in the life of a young writer in my day; and, besides, I hope they may be welcome to the lighter, but still serious-minded hours of students in colleges, and to teachers of literature, as a view of literary affairs in the nineteenth century, though desultory, yet not often to be found in such variety and compactness, nor easily to be come at. And I am satisfied that my old editors, Wendell Phillips Garrison and Thomas Bailey Aldrich and kinder and more loyal editors no young writer ever had would be pleased at this late gleaning from the long-abandoned spring wheat-field.

BEVERLY, October 8, 1920.

G. E. W.