Belloc, Mr. G.K. Chesterton, Mr. Austin Dobson,
Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. E.V. Lucas, Mrs. Meynell, Mr. Edward Thomas and
Mr. W.B. Yeats. In addition a formal acknowledgment is due to Messrs.
Chatto and Windus for leave to include an essay by Robert Louis
Stevenson; to Messrs. Longmans and Co. for an essay of Richard
Jefferies; and Messrs. Methuen and Co. for two by Mr. Lucas, and one
by Mr. Belloc. Mr. A.H. Bullen has very kindly given his free consent
in the case of "The Last of the Gleemen,"--a boon to be grateful for.
Without these later pages, the book would be like the hat of Tom
Lizard's ceremonious old gentleman, whose story, he said, would not
have been worth a farthing if the brim had been any narrower. As to
the actual omissions, they are due either to the limits of the volume,
or to the need of keeping the compass in regard to both the subjects
and the writers chosen. American essayists are left for another day;
as are those English writers, like Sir William Temple and Bolingbroke,
Macaulay and Matthew Arnold, who have given us the essay in literary
full dress.

E.R.

* * * * *

The following is a bibliography in brief of the chief works drawn upon
for the selection:

Caxton, Morte D'Arthur, 1485; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, 1532; Bacon,
Essays, 1740; Thos. Dekker, Gull's Horn Book, 1608; Jeremy Taylor,
Holy Dying, 1651; Thos. Fuller, Holy and Profane States, 1642; Cowley,
Prose Works, Several Discourses, 1668; The Guardian, 1729; The
Examiner, 1710; The Tatler, 1709; Wm. Cobbett, Rural Rides, 1830;
Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, 1762; Addison and Steele, The
Spectator, 1711; The Rambler, 1750-52; The Adventurer, 1753; Lamb,
Essays of Elia, 1823, 1833; Hazlitt, Comic Writers, 1819; Table Talk,
1821-22; The New Monthly Magazine, 1826-27; Coleridge, Literaria
Biographia, 1817; Wordsworth, Prose Works, 1876; John Brown, Rab and
his Friends, 1858; Thackeray, Roundabout Papers, 1863; Carlyle,
Edinburgh Review, 1831; Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller, 1857;
Shelley, Essays, 1840; Leigh Hunt, The Indicator, 1820; Mary Russell
Mitford, Our Village, 1827-32; De Quincey, Collected Works, 1853-60;
R.L. Stevenson, Memories and Portraits, 1887; Edmund Gosse (The
Realm), 1895; Austin Dobson, Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 1892; Alice
Meynell, Colour of Life, 1896; G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant, 1901;
E.V. Lucas, Fireside and Sunshine, 1906, Character and Comedy, 1907;
Augustine