NOTE
In the pages that here follow I have gathered up such of my more or less critical contributions to various Reviews, and to one great daily paper, as I am least unwilling to preserve within the covers of a book.
As the proportion borne by things reprinted from the ‘Standard’ will seem small to those who know during how many years I have been permitted to contribute to its columns the expression of opinion on many of those arts which have been both my delight and my laborious study, let me just simply say that every line that I have written in that paper has been written with a single eye to the needs of the occasion and the moment, and the more expressly any writing is designed for a particular need and place, the less, I think, is it adapted for transplanting.
There has been no attempt to bring these essays, or these fragments, ‘up-to-date’—to bring them to the point of view, I mean, of the time at which they chance to be republished. A suppression here, and there the alteration of a phrase—little else is attempted. They remain, frankly, ‘contributions.’
F. W.
Westminster, October 1899.