ENGLISH PROSE OF THE EDITED BY RAYMOND MACDONALD ALDEN PREFACE THIS Volume appears in continuation of the plan which was initiated with a collection of Readings in English Prose of the Eighteenth Century, and with a single exception is made in accordance with the same principles: that is, it undertakes to give a sufficient body of prose readings for the use of those engaged in the general study of English literature in the period in question. In the nineteenth century, however, the mass of material is so great that it has seemed best to abandon the effort to represent the minor prose writers, of interest less for intrinsic worth than for their relation to particular ideas and movements, and to confine the volume to those of major importance in pure literature, exclusive of fiction. While many of the names thus omitted (such as Southey and Leigh Hunt, for example, in the earlier period, and Borrow and Leslie Stephen in the later) are tantalizingly attractive, yet the thirteen chosen writers stand out so clearly from among their contemporaries that it happens that not a single additional name was recommended for admission by those critics who were kind enough to look over the editor's list. Besides these, space has been found-rather illogically, but on what appear to be imperative grounds of utility for some representation of the great reviews of the early nineteenth century; for to study the age of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats without some acquaintance with the reviewers is out of the question, and their work is usually more inaccessible than anything else in this volume. Complete compositions, other things being equal, have of course been preferred or sections, chapters, and the like, having the same independent character. Where omissions have been made they are indicated scrupulously. Some of these omissions are matters of regret, the mere mechanics of the vol |