It is not often the privilege of a contributor to address his former
editor in so fatherly a fashion; yet it is appropriate because you
justified an old proverb in becoming, if I may say so, my literary
parent. Though I had enjoyed the hospitality, I dare not say the
welcome, of more than one London editor, you were the first who took off
the bearing-rein from my frivolity. You allowed me that freedom, of
manner and matter, which I have only experienced in undergraduate
periodicals. It is not any lack of gratitude to such distinguished
editors as the late Mr. Henley; or Mr. Walter Pollock, who first accorded
me the courtesies of print in a periodical not distinguished for its
courtesy; or Professor C. J. Holmes, who has occasionally endured me with
patience in the _Burlington Magazine_; or Mr. Edmund Gosse, to whom I am
under special obligations; that I address myself particularly to you. But
I, who am not frightened of many things, have always been frightened of
editors. I am filled with awe when I think of the ultramarine pencil
that is to delete my ultramontane views. You were, as I have hinted, the
first to abrogate its use in my favour. When you, if not Consul, were at
least Plancus, I think the only thing you ever rejected of mine was an
essay entitled 'Editors, their Cause and Cure.' It is not included, for
obvious reasons, in the present volume, of which you will recognise most
of the contents. These may seem even to your indulgent eyes a trifle
miscellaneous and disconnected. Still there is a thread common to all,
though I cannot claim for them uniformity. There is no strict adherence
to those artificial divisions of literature into fiction, essay,
criticism, and poetry. Count Tolstoy, however, has shown us that a novel
may be an essay rather than a story. No less a writer than Swift used
the medium of fiction for his most brilliant criticism of life; his
fables, apart from their satire, are often mere essays. Plato, Sir
Thomas More, William Morris, and Mr. H. G. Wells have not disdained to
transmit their philosophy under the domino of romance or myth. Some of