even attempt to cite them. I should perhaps add to this list a favorite performance of his which is quite as exasperating to an editor as the worst of the others, citing passages from a first edition which were expunged in later ones, but without hinting at such effacement; this trick in the cases of Mackintosh, Montalembert, and Gibbon, cost several days of wasted time.

But the abominably corrupt state of his longer quotations — some of which are simply miracles of mangling, and much the greater part of which are more or less misquoted — cannot be accounted for by bad memory; for it can hardly be supposed that he trusted solely to his memory for whole pages. I can only guess at the modus operandi: but my guess is, that he copied his extracts by scribbling off the catch-words, trusting to his memory to fill out the skeleton when he prepared his copy for the press, and never comparing the outline with the original (thus often leaving out words, phrases, and occasionally even whole lines); that as might be expected, his memory was treacherous when the time came to write out his extracts in full; that (which is certain) the printers made mistakes in his copy, and he did not correct them; and as a result (which is most certain of all), that his quoted matter cannot be matched in the language for (sometimes absurd) divergence from the original.

It would seem at first thought that there would be no trouble in dealing with these things, that the only thing necessary was to restore the true text, if it could be found, and there all difficulty ended; but in fact it has not been at all casy to decide in every case what to do, and I am by no means sure I have invariably made the best decision. Many of the alleged quotations could not be found at all, even when every attainable scrap of an author's published works or words was at hand. In some of these cases I can definitely prove that they have no existence, and sometimes can even show what he manufactured his "quotation" out of; but in far the greater number (and a list of the undiscoverable things which seem to lie easily at hand, and which I supposed to do so till after thorough and fruitless search, would excite surprise) I can only conjecture that he has credited them to the wrong authors, and have either passed them silently or transferred the problem to the reader by a foot-note. Sometimes it is a "made-up" quotation, a fiction founded on fact, so to speak (there are instances of this in the articles on Sterne and Pitt, and elsewhere); sometimes the "quotation" gives the general sense of the original, but in a totally different form of words: in both these cases foot-notes are the obvious propriety. But between the latter and the ones so

slightly blundered as to involve only silent correction, there lie every grade of mangling, a border-land where judgment is difficult, and I have sometimes substituted a correct form where another might have left the corrupt form standing and annotated it; I can only say that in no case of the sort have I tampered with Bagehot's own words, and in nearly every one I have called attention to the great difference of the correct quotation from Bagehot's text.

That the source of every quotation has been given whenever possible, follows of course. Apart from the question of accuracy, a reader of any author has a right to know this, in order to examine the context and follow the author in his track of reading; and judging from my own experience, no other service in editing save the explanation of obscure allusions is comparable to this, nor any lack an equal hindrance and exasperation. For the same reason, I have indicated where it was feasible the main sources whence he drew the facts for his review articles, and that of many special biographic or historical items. My object has been, to make the volumes as handily useful to the least scholarly reader as might be; I have assumed that many would be glad to use the articles as a base for some further reading if it was made easy, who could not or would not engage in any research requiring much time.

It would be ungrateful not to mention here the two assistants who have lightened my work and added to its value in its later stages. During the last few months of 1888 Miss T. J. O'Connell did much capable and faithful searching at the British Museum; but my chief debt is to Miss Fanny G. Darrow of Boston, who ransacked libraries in behalf of the work for a year, and without whose zeal, patience, and book-lover's "nose" for the probable place of extracts, the measure of its merits would have fallen far below what it is.

I come next to a most delicate subject, on which I have risked much vituperation; namely, my dealings with the murdered grammar and impossible syntax with which all Bagehot's writings abound. No writer of eminence in modern times (so far as I know) has treated so defiantly the primary grammatical rules of the English language, or the first principles of construction in any language. He was a business man, and he is an adept at "business talk" as frequently heard among that class of men, — perfectly lucid as to matter and perfectly incoherent as to structure, utterances which no man can mistake and no man can parse. There are sentences in his works which are no more English than they are Chinese, and yet are not in the least indistinct as to

meaning; indeed, Mr. Giffen says he sometimes wrote bad grammar purposely to make his meaning clearer, which is a startling proposition. He must have known the difference between a principal and a subordinate clause, but he put the knowledge to no practical use. His moods are kept pretty well in hand; but his tenses are at the mercy of fate and chance, and some of his paragraphs are perfect see-saws of past and present, mixed with the wildest indifference not only to grammar but to sense. His verbs have no certainty of agreeing with his nouns in number and person; his personal pronouns are as defiant of the trammels of singular and plural relations as his verbs are of the fetters of tense; and his relatives may or may not refer to the noun they follow.

That no editor has any business to rewrite a line or change a substantive word of his author's text is self-evident; and that the substitution of any language of mine for that of Walter Bagehot would be the summit of impertinence and presumptuous folly is equally evident. What readers wish to know and have a right to know is, what Bagehot said, not what his editor thinks he ought to have said. Therefore, in no case have I meddled with the structure of a sentence in any way; in a few cases I have called attention to the entanglement of the syntax, but I have not even attempted to mend such atrocities as "The period at which the likeness was attempted to be taken" (beginning of the "English Constitution"), or other like gems of English. But I do not think even editorial fidelity or reverence for the memory of a great man (and I cannot better gauge my own for Walter Bagehot than by saying that I believe this edition is a higher service to the public than any original work I could do) binds me to allow a plural noun to remain coupled with a singular verb (or vice versa), or a singular pronoun in one clause set off against a plural one in the following like clause, or a present and a past tense similarly yoked together in a most discordant union, — merely because the great man did not read his proofs and a patent slip of the pen remained uncorrected. I do not believe even he, little as he cared for such things, would wish to have all the rags and tatters of his haste and slovenliness scrupulously saved up and exhibited to posterity, any more than a public speaker would care to have a phonograph record an accidental hiccough; nor do I believe that even the most devoted admirers of Bagehot, to whom every word is worth preserving as instinct with the flavor of that rich mind (among whom I count myself), care to have their senses jarred upon by such purely accidental slips. Nevertheless, I recognize the right of the public to know just what their author wrote and how he

left his text; that he wrote carelessly and did not read his proofs is in itself an item of interest in comprehending him. And still more, I owe both to them and to myself to give the minutest information just how far I have tampered with the text, so that they may not fear that they are reading a mangled and wantonly altered version, and I may not be suspected of meddling with his language. I have therefore kept a scrupulous account of all the changes, even the minutest, (except such as are made by the insertion of words or letters, - in which case the additions are invariably put in brackets, - or by foot-notes,) and give them in a separate table. By this means, any one who finds comfort in knowing how badly his author could write can do so, and where no notice is given may be sure he is reading Bagehot undefiled.

That all extracts in foreign languages are translated, ought to be more a matter of course than it is: in anything designed for wide popular reading, neglect to do so is either laziness or swagger. The object being that all readers shall have the fullest understanding and enjoyment with the least friction, it is absurd to lock up any portion out of the reach of four-fifths of them; and it is not the business either of a writer or an editor to impose penalties for defective education. There is of course one palpable exception to this, — where an extract is cited as a sample of style instead of matter; which in general excludes translation of all poetry as well as of some prose. But curiously enough, not a single quotation of Bagehot's from any foreign author is given to illustrate style: even the verses from Sophocles in the essay on Shelley are cited only as an instance of classic bareness of decoration, and he quotes poems from Béranger only to illustrate that poet's philosophy of life. The worst translation possible, therefore, would be better than none; while in fact Mr. Walter Learned has graced this edition with several excellent translations of Béranger (some of which I think much the finest of any yet executed), and for the others I have taken the best I could find.

The foot-notes marked “B.” are Bagehot's; those of Mr. Hutton are marked "R. H. H."; my own are signed "Ed." The latter is only added, however, to controversial or corrective notes; simple references to sources of quotations are left uncredited, though all but a very few are new to this edition, and some of the very few in previous ones are either wrong or unintelligible. By the latter I mean page references, which are the most exasperating of traps, since one is never sure of having the same edition as that cited, and the page number simply confuses him on any other. For this reason I have avoided them rigorously, and made references to

volume and chapter almost wholly; the few page references given are to standard and always accessible editions like Bohn, or to books where only one edition has been issued. It will be noticed that I have refrained almost wholly from argumentative notes; even the few which seem such turn really upon questions of fact. It is a gross wrong to an author to make his popularity float criticism of himself which could not gain a hearing if published separately, in such intimate union with the text that it cannot be escaped; and nothing is more annoying to a reader than to be incessantly teased with the information that the editor, for whom he does not care, differs from the author, for whom he does care. There are scores of points on which I think Bagehot's opinion could be contested or limited, some of them provoking in their perversity; but I have not forced the reader even to take the trouble of skipping an argument on the subject.

It ought not to be necessary, but to some it will be, to disclaim any overweening notion of the value of these or any corrections. Of course Bagehot's greatness is not affected by such trifles: his thought and his wit, the value of his matter and the charm of his style, did not have to wait for this before delighting the world, and so far as either the use or the pleasure of his works is concerned, they would be substantially as well without it. But then, the same thing may be said of every other great author, whom neverthelesss it is always thought a worthy service to present in as fair and clear a shape as possible. Such work is, to use a familiar comparison, only "picking vermin off a lion's skin"; but for my own part I prefer a clean lion to a dirty one, and must not be accused of forgetting that he is a lion because I perform the service thoroughly, on the contrary, but for my hearty admiration for him it would not have been undertaken. Once for all, Walter Bagehot's writings have been to me for many years one of the choicest of intellectual luxuries, and a valued store of sound thought and mental stimulation, and full appreciation of these must be held as implied in any difference of opinion I express; but even an admired master and teacher is not an idol to be uncritically worshiped.

Lastly, despite all the care and labor expended on the work, I know well that blunders will probably be found in it by sharpeyed specialists, each with more time for a few items than the editor has had for the whole. Very likely they will vindicate Bagehot's accuracy on some points; not impossibly I have made some fresh errors in trying to correct his. I cannot escape or forestall such criticism, and would not if I could, the public is entitled to