Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/13

 EDITORIAL NOTE

time before the War, the late Mr. Dixon Scott arranged to publish a collection of his essays and literary criticisms, and after his death at Gallipoli it was felt that it was due to his memory that the plan he had left unfinished should be carried through. He had drastically revised and largely rewritten six of the principal essays, and amongst his papers were found various tentative lists of others he had thought of including in a volume which he proposed to entitle "Men of Letters." Most of the essays named in his lists have been brought together in these pages. Four have been added (Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, Mrs. Meynell, C. E. Montague, and Rupert Brooke), for the selection of which the present editor is responsible. The six on Shaw, Barrie, Kipling, Houghton, Granville Barker, and William Morris are the only essays that have received final revision at the hand of their author; the rest are reprinted from the periodicals in which they originally appeared.

Because of certain opinions Dixon Scott had expressed privately and in his writings, it was felt that nothing could be more fitting than that his book, published in such circumstances, should have an Introduction by Mr. Max Beerbohm, and this Mr. Beerbohm most kindly vii