Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/17

 sarily hasty writing. 'Documents' must not be falsified. I may perhaps venture to add, in fairness to myself, that there are some few things in them which I would have put differently if I had been writing over my own name in the first instance.

To make this little volume more worthy ot acceptance, I have added a few reviews of works written by or about the authors treated. These also appeared in the Athenæum for the most part after the death of the subjects of my éloges. They were more detailed estimates of parts of the authors' works, or they dealt more at large with their lives, or in other ways they seemed to me to supplement the more general éloges written for a special occasion from a special point of view.

Looking back on these memorial essays, I can now discern the general method on which they were formed, though I was not conscious of it at the time of writing. At the moment of an author's death, we think primarily of the man we have lost. But we mourn the man for the sake of his works, hence it is those of his qualities that are shown in his works which naturally engage our attention at the moment of his death. These essays are therefore appropriately devoted to the literary qualities of their subjects' minds. They are of the psychological, not of the aesthetic order of criticism.

'There are,' to quote myself elsewhere, 'two methods of studying literary productions, which