AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE RE-ARRANGED EDITION (1883)

Summary

1. My reasons for this carefully revised reprint of the second volume of Modern Painters, after so often declaring that I would reprint none of the book except the pieces relating to natural history, are given in the eighth number of Deucalion: and I will only say farther here that many and many a time during the revision, I wished I had persisted in my old resolution; not in the mere wounded vanity of an old author looking back on his earliest essays, but in much shame, and some indignation, at finding the most solemn of all subjects of human thought handled at once with the presumption of a youth, and the affectation of an anonymous writer.

2. But that the confession of faults might be complete, I have made no attempt to amend the text. Not a word is omitted; and, I believe, only three or four changed, which were too obscure, or evidently at the time inadvertent. A few, now useless, notes, referring to buildings since destroyed, or pictures carried away from their homes to Berlin or St. Petersburg, have been cancelled,—and a few pedantic ones shortened; while the parts of the text which needed contradiction, or correction, have been dealt with as they occurred, in notes distinguished from the old ones by being placed within marks of parenthesis.