With this in my mind-keeping English prose as a grand succession while yet trying to release it from any order of specimens ', I have (and the critics are welcome to the admission) not cared a whit for the number of extracts by which this or that author is over or under 'represented'. All comment directed upon this will simply ignore the book's purpose. There is a great deal of Berners' Froissart. Why? For two reasons: the first that it holds the core of true English gentility: the second that, in the matter of technique, our prose learnt its grace of our dear enemy, France.

For a like reason I have been bold to include an amount of 'out-of-door' matter that may here and there be considered to fall beneath the dignity of high prose and would anyhow overweight a book of specimens. For it is curious to observe, in contrast with our poets who sing of green country all the time, what a disproportionate mass of our prose is urban, and how rarely it contrives, at its best, to get off the pavement. As a countryman I may easily be blamed for a stubborn zeal in redressing this balance.

Yet, this opportunity given, I do not repent of my attempt to redress it. Let me illustrate. When Wolfe crossed the St. Lawrence at night to scale the heights of Abraham, it is recorded

that he murmured a stanza or two from Gray's Elegy—that his vision on that dark passage went back to a green and English country churchyard; so if the reader will turn to an extract Í have taken from Charles Reade (No. 429) he will feel this imperishable land of ours revived, and with tears, in the hearts of its roughest Those men had no 'patriotism', no sense of any duty to England: a fair sprinkling of them, perhaps, had been convicts and 'left their country for their country's good'. But what they felt is just what I could wish this book to recall to the breast of any gallant Englishman on outpost duty in fort or tent.

outcasts.

I

Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos

Ducit et immemores non sinit esse sui.

propose that, with the aid of the Clarendon Press, this book shall be put upon sale on November 25, 1925, twenty-five years to a day since The Oxford Book of English Verse saw the light and started to creep into public recognition, at first (as I remember) very slowly. While no more superstitious than ordinary men, I take a pleasure in observing birthdays and other private anniversaries as well as those of the Church: and it is my fancy to choose this as an omen of continuance in some public favour. A quarter of a century is a large slice in the life

of any man who pretends (as in this book must be pretended) some claim to preserve a capacity for discerning good literature from that which is less good and I feel that the interval may, as happens to men, have somewhat chilled and hardened the judgement. I have, for example, removed out of this anthology many sounding passages for the sole reason that on second thoughts they did not ring true—that is to me, at my time of life, when the instinct to admire is subdued by a scruple against leaving this world with any profession of knowing more than one does. And on a similar principle, in covenant with the years, I have felt it right to concede that my sympathy with prose nowadays being written, though often warm enough, misses a right capacity to discriminate. Therefore I end this book with writers who had already solidified their work by 1914, and trust that the reader will accept this break-off as reasonable and allow me donatum iam rude to hang up just there the old harness. Yet, relinquishing it, I look forward in entire faith to the opening fields. The Newspaper Press admits to-day a portentous amount of that Jargon, or flaccid writing to which flaccid thought instinctively resorts. But literature, I repeat, is memorable speech, recording memorable thoughts and deeds, and in such deeds at any rate the younger

generation has not failed. Our fathers have, in the process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and of captaining all these excellencies to its service. Turning over these pages before they go to the printer I recognize (not, I hope, too fondly) that the whole purpose moves to music. So, taking leave of a trade which in these years has at least not lacked the compliment of imitation, I look back somewhat wistfully on the fields traversed, to be searched over by other eyes to which I would fain bequeath, if I could so entreat the gods, a freshness of eyesight more delicate than mine.

My debts to those who have granted me the use of copyright passages are acknowledged elsewhere. I conclude here with a word of special gratitude to one or two helpful friends: to Mr. Charles Whibley, to Professor G. Gordon of Oxford,and to many of the Oxford University Press, at Oxford itself and at Amen House, who on an old tradition would probably resent my particularizing them by name. But, in old regard, I must name two friends: the first, the late Mr. Charles Cannan, sometime Secretary

of the Clarendon Press, who suggested this enterprise and nursed its beginnings: the second, the late Mr. A. R. Waller, Secretary of the Cambridge University Press, who fostered it with the purest good-will and of his own wide reading freely bestowed all that was in his power to give. I like to think that, when my time comes in turn, I shall survive in the Oxford Books of English Verse and English Prose along with these two good men.

A. Q-C.