haphazard visions-- that is to say, my choice of subjects has
been
determined by no desire to construct a system or to prove a
theory, but by simple motives of convenience and of art. It has
been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain. It would
have been futile to hope to tell even a precis of the truth about
the Victorian age, for the shortest precis must fill innumerable
volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, an educational
authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have
sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth
which took my fancy and lay to my hand.

I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of
interest from the strictly biographical, no less than from the
historical point of view. Human beings are too important to be
treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is
independent of any temporal processes-- which is eternal, and
must
be felt for its own sake. The art of biography seems to have
fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few
masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great
biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and
Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a
few shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the
most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of
writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do
not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life
as to live one. Those two fat volumes, with which it is our
custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know them, with
their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,