PREFACE. 'HE title I have adopted may, I think, be fairly given to a book derived, in nearly equal proportions, from the two sources of reading and experience. From its fragmentary and desultory form, it may have to the reader the appearance of a collection of débris, or wreck; this, I assure him, is not the case. With the exception of very few of its pages, some fifteen or twenty of which have already been in print, most of its materials have been committed, for the first time, to paper during the last few months, though a great part of them have been in my mind for years-long enough, indeed, I would fain hope, to impart to them, even when not strictly new, some of the kind of originality indicated in the following extract: |