obligations; and to such a feeling I have endeavoured to give utterance in the dedication prefixed to these Volumes.

Of the illustrious men, who have enhanced the value of many other courtesies, by consenting to receive this little tribute of my respect and admiration, I shall simply say, that I hope they will long live to add to the obligations which their writings have already conferred on the world; and to receive the grateful acknowledgments of men whose homage is worth more than mine, and who shall prove worthier pupils of such masters. One more deeply impressed with the value of their works, or more frankly disposed to confess the benefits derived from them, will not, I believe, be easily found.

But there is another illustrious name, which was to have been added to theirs, respecting which I cannot prevail on myself to be wholly silent. I allude to the late Lord Jeffrey. Only a few days before his death, he had in the very kindest terms assented to my wishes that he would permit me to offer him this tribute of my respect: his death now renders it impossible to misconstrue a somewhat fuller expression of that respect into adulation.

Many, indeed, are his claims on my grateful remembrance. Not only was he one of the intellectual benefactors of my youth -as he was of thousands besides myself by his admirable Essays in almost every department of polite literature; but he had given not a few of the compositions in these volumes the advantage of his long-practised critical judgment, while passing through the press; and had expressed

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in reference to all of them-perhaps an unmeritedbut certainly a most cordial and flattering approbation. His genius and many accomplishments the opulence of his knowledge, the acuteness, versatility, and brilliancy of his mind, are sufficiently proclaimed by his writings, and universally known to his countrymen; but his kindness of heart and amiability of temper the qualities which endeared him to so large a circle of friends, and made it impossible for him to have any permanent enemies; the candour and nobleness with which he retracted error in himself, the frankness and cordiality with which he conceded merit in others, these traits of character, yet more admirable than any of an intellectual order, only those who knew him can adequately appreciate. 'We are still mourning,' says a distinguished Edinburgh correspondent (personally a stranger to me), 'the loss of Lord Jeffrey; still filled desiderio tam cari capitis. Did you know him? If you did, I need not say you loved him, even more than you admired him. you did not, you cannot know how worthy of love he was how full of graces as well as gifts.' 'His death,' says another distinguished correspondent of the same city, 'seems quite different from that of any other man. One thinks of it as of the fall of the Calton Hill or of the Castle Rock; so closely had his fame been associated with the fame of the city.'

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The reader will indulge me in these few sentences of respect to the memory of the distinguished Founder of the Journal in the pages of which the following Essays appeared; and whose most spontaneous kindness towards myself I shall not easily forget.

And now may I claim similar indulgence while I add a few words in relation to the Essays themselves?

The previous series of 'selections' from the Edinburgh Review bear the names of men who needed no 'prologue' to introduce them to the public; though one of them has thought proper to subjoin an 'epilogue,' which is assuredly not characterised by any of the proverbial insipidity of that species of composition.

Indeed the authors of those series of Essays, so far from needing any introduction to the public, had achieved, long before those publications appeared, a great reputation in far different fields from those of literature. Their intellectual characteristics were already so well known that every body had affiliated to them their literary offspring even before the parents owned them. As we sometimes trace the forms of mountains through the thin mist which envelopes them, so the outlines of these capacious minds were distinctly visible through the thin veil of their anonym; and when they prefixed their names to the title-page of their collected Essays, they, in fact, told the world nothing but what it knew before.

With myself it is the exact contrary. When I have put my name to these volumes, I have not in fact ceased to be anonymous; or at most have told the world that a writer of certain Essays, whose name was unknown, has, it appears, an unknown name.

For this reason I should have been well content, had it appeared right to the Publishers, to suppress this cypher of a name altogether. Nor for this reason only. The good-natured world will sometimes extend

to anonymous writings an indulgence, which is partly due to a suspicion that they proceed from one better entitled to speak with authority than is really the case. Some of the interest attached to them is likely enough to be dispelled when it is discovered that they are ascribed to a name which conveys nothing.

Such as they are, however, I commit these Essays to the world; and if it shall be disposed to grant them, in their collected form, the favour which it was pleased to extend to not a few of them when originally published, I shall have reason to be more than satisfied.

Cicero tells Atticus that he always kept by him a little book of prefaces or exordiums, to suit the exigencies of his somewhat multifarious writings. I should be glad to be at liberty to go to such a repository on the present occasion; though I am afraid that even Cicero would have been perplexed to find one of these ready-made introductions suited to his purpose, had any one work of his been so unhappily miscellaneous as the contents of these two volumes.

As an apology for venturing to treat some of these very various subjects, I may perhaps be permitted to mention, that several were urged on me by persons whose judgment could not but have had weight with any man. They were pleased to think that it was in my power to say something upon the suggested topics, not unserviceable to truth, nor ungrateful to the public. If I erred, I may well be pardoned for having yielded to solicitations which came in a shape so flattering. This observation more particularly applies to the subjects in the Second Volume.

Had I been left entirely to my own taste, my preferences would almost uniformly have been for the quiet paths of literature. Into the noisy, dusty, thronged highway of controversy I should have rarely ventured. But I will be bold to say, that no solicitations of others would have induced me to write on themes to which I was not conscious of having honestly endeavoured-however ineffectually—to render myself competent. The subjects, though sometimes suggested to my own choice, were yet always approved by it. Nor, assuredly, were the sentiments I have expressed taken up with levity; if erroneous, they are erroneous after very mature deliberation, and can have no claim to indulgence.

But it may, perhaps, be said, Is the style in which certain theological subjects are treated, in the Second Volume, decorous? Of course I think so; otherwise nothing should have induced me to adopt it.

For the apparent levity, indeed, with which I have treated some doctrines which I most conscientiously believe pernicious errors; doctrines which many persons would fain render invulnerable to every mode of assault-to satire, by representing them as too sacred for ridicule, and to argument, by representing them as too mysterious for reason, I can offer no apology; being fully and calmly convinced that it is the only style effectually adapted to dispel the false halo of pseudo-sacred associations with which so many minds invest them.

A general defence of the style I have adopted will be found, in several places, in the Essays in question. For the present, it is sufficient to say that, though not