INTRODUCTION. The present final collection of his miscellaneous papers, originally written for, and printed in the American Monthly Magazine, Arcturus, the Church Record, the Democratic and Whig Reviews, Boston Miscellany, Union Magazine, Literary World, and other periodicals, is intended to include such of the writer's papers (chiefly of literary criticism) as have appeared to him worthy of preservation. With the exception of a few comparatively recent articles, they were mostly written and printed 1838-1845, and comprise a little more than one-half of his entire contributions to the press up to the present date. Most of the papers here collected (since the publication of The Analyst, anonymously in 1839, and which was made up of lucubrations written the year and a half previously) have appeared already in the volumes of Literary Studies and Essays upon Authors and Books. Holding the doctrine of Hazlitt, however, to be sound, that a first edition is as good as MSS., as the impressions of all these three miscellanies were limited, and have been long since out of print, and as numerous typographical errors had crept in, as well as mistakes of fact and opinion, it was thought a new and correct edition might be favorably received by the present generation of readers, young students in particular, in college, the lovers of the choice old English literature, and those cultivated general readers to whom these miscellanies are unknown. The papers selected from The Analyst embracing nearly two-thirds of the original volume, are placed in the appendix. In point of time, the earliest efforts of the writer and most of them brief after the classical models of Essay and Character-writing, they form a series of papers distinct from his later articles of a similar description. The only two of his biographical sketches, which appeared to harmonize with the literary matter of which these volumes are composed, are included in the first volume and a few miscellaneous lucubrations heretofore uncollected in the second. Dates are affixed to certain of the essays and criticisms to explain allusions and suggestions otherwise unseasonable, or to exhibit a chronological excuse for change of opinion. The article on the Opera, if now written, would be much changed and also the Thoughts on Bulwer would be greatly modified despite the generous commendation of the North American Review, April, 1840. New York, March 2, 1857. |