Modern Essays, Reprinted From Leading Articles in the Times

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. To read these essays on end may not be impossible, but certainly would be undesirable. Not only would there be found in them some amount Of repetition; but the similarity Of treatment imposed by their con formity to a. Recognised if not prescribed journalistic type would necessarily give them, quite unjustly, an effect Of monotony. Notwithstanding variety Of authorship, notwithstanding distinctions (as well as distinction) of style, the mould in which they are cast was determined beforehand. And their collee tion thus Side by side lays the device - shall we be so bold as to say the trick - Of their construction Open to sight, and perhaps to a somewhat amused criticism. Under such a test, the mechanism is apt to become a. Little too Obvious, the verbal adroitness and deft manipulation Of thought may seem to be those Of a game played for its own sake, and the free play of intelligence to be exercised as much over the ways of expressing ideas as over the ideas themselves. Canon Scott Holland, whose jocundity has never any touch Of malice, has poked some quiet fun in his own col lected volume Of biographical essays, A Bundle of Memories, at what he calls the skilled gentry Of the Times Literary Supplement. Perhaps he would accept for them a phrase which occurs in an essay in this volume as not undescriptive, early birds with a power Of expressing their own satisfaction in the form Of a theory. But there is no reproach in good craftsmanship, and no discredit in being con cerned with ideas as well as with persons, with what makes our lives as well as with lives actually made.