PREFACE.

I APPREHEND that the University, though she exacts nothing of the kind, in some degree expects that those whom she has honoured with her Professorships should give what they have to give sooner or later to the world. Such being the case, I need advance no other reason for publishing these Lectures. The lectures which I have delivered in my time are of course more in number than those contained in this volume, but owing to a variety of accidents my manuscripts fell into confusion, and have many of them gone astray. I am obliged, therefore, to content myself with what comes readiest to my hand.

Of the Lectures that are missing I rather regret some, particularly two on 'Jason and Medea' and one on the tragedy of 'Hamlet.' My examination of 'Hamlet' ought to have come in between what I say of 'Othello' and what I say of 'Macbeth,' and its absence leaves rather a disastrous gap in the Shakspere series. It cannot, however, be helped now, and so many

able men have written about 'Hamlet' that the world,

perhaps, needs nothing more.

Of the Lectures which do appear, I have only to say in other words much the same as I said on a former occasion. When people talk of a feeling for poetry they are guided by a just instinct. The north country mathematician observed, after reading 'Virgil' through, 'It proves nought;' now what he says of one poet we may extend to poets in general: poetry proves nought, and is too impalpable to be cut up into abstract propositions.

Any listeners, moreover, that I might have were not bound to come, nor if they did come were they bound to stay my business, having once got hold of them, was to keep them in the Taylor Building till I had done speaking, if I could: accordingly, I thought it better to avoid all attempts at subtle criticism. I tried instead to interest my audience (and I may perhaps be pardoned for saying that I do not consider myself to have failed in doing so) by what the Greeks used to call Epideictic Orations. I trust, therefore, that any reader of mine, disposed to think my style too florid, or again too light and familiar, for a University lecturer will bear in mind what I have aimed at, will bear in mind that I claim for my Addresses every privilege of a speech: a speech, too, belonging to a particular class of orations, namely, as I have just said, Epideictic Orations. Now, for such a speech, in my judgment, 'tous les genres sont bons,