Copyrighted, 1889, by THE TRAVELERS INSURANCE COMPANY, of Hartford, Conn. Copyrighted, 1891, by THE TRAVELERS INSURANCE COMPANY. CONTENTS OF VOL. I. PAGE Bagehot as an Economist, by Robert Giffen (Fortnightly (Fortnightt Review, April 1, 1880) lxiii The First Edinburgh Reviewers (National Review, October, 1 Hartley Coleridge (Prospective Review, October, 1852) Mr. Clough's Poems (National Review, October, 1862) Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (National Review, January, 1862) 352 365189 EDITOR'S PREFACE. THIS EDITION was planned and begun as a simple reprint, uniform and indexed, of the existing editions of Bagehot's works;* there was then no thought of "editing" the text, or recognition of its extreme necessity. The accidental notice, after the work was well under way, that a series of extracts from a familiar book were full of errors, led first to an attempt to verify and correct all quotations; then, as attention was more sharply directed to the text, to the discovery that Bagehot's own matter was in almost as corrupt a state as his extracts from other writers, and in consequence to still further examination of the original sources of his facts, which resulted in some surprising developments; lastly, to a collation of his original review articles with the reprints revised by himself, — a not unfruitful task. Had the enormous labor involved, and the utter impossibility of fully accomplishing the design, been realized at the outset (for it needed several years of exclusive time, while only the spare moments of a couple of busy years could be given 66 * Namely, the two volumes of "Literary Studies" and the volume of Biographical Studies" (including the "Letters on the French Coup d'État "), and the unfinished "Economic Studies," edited by his friend and schoolfellow, Mr. Hutton; and the scattered volumes "English Constitution," Physics and Politics," "Lombard Street," "Depreciation of Silver," and "International Coinage" (from the Economist of 1868, as the first reprinted edition was unobtainable and the second had not been issued; the latter is used in the present set). To this edition are added also the obituary article on John Stuart Mill from the Economist, to fill a gap in the "Economic Studies"; Mr. Hutton's memoir in the National Cyclopædia; and copious extracts from a very uneven article on "Oxford" in the Prospective Review. Mr. Hutton judiciously omitted this essay from his collection, -as a whole it is not only obsolete, but (an unknown thing in Bagehot's later writings) rather tedious; yet it contains in spots so much of his very best wit and acute sense that it seemed a wrong both to him and the public to suppress it entirely. Especially good are the passages on the use and influence of the higher education (though even this has another side which he neglects); and the closing one on the smoldering fury of hate in the English mind toward anything papistic, -as racy and characteristic a bit as anything he ever wrote.- - ED. VOL. I. - A (i) |