PREFACE. THE following passages have been selected and annotated for what are known as "educational" purposes, but with a lively consciousness that any education worth the name comprises something more than instruction in grammar and etymology. If the reading of English in schools is intended to prepare pupils for a study which shall be profitable to intellectual culture, it would be as well to commence as one desires to continue. Unfortunately there can be little doubt that young learners are sometimes discouraged by dry passages, drily commented upon by unsympathetic erudition. Those who are not so discouraged (chiefly because they are lovers of facts which may possibly "pay" at examination time) are apt in after-life to treat English literature in much the same wasteful and pernicious way in which Latin and Greek texts are often treated. The beauty of the thoughts, the exactness of the insight, the art and force and delicacy of the expressions are lost sight of amid all the numerous grammatical and etymological observations which obtrude themselves, in and out of season, upon a consciousness trained to alertness in such matters, and such matters only. No one will, of |