PROSE WRITINGS

Summary

Of the prose writings which now follow, the only ones already in print are the Descriptive Catalogue and the Sibylline Leaves. To the former of these, the Public Address, which here succeeds it, forms a fitting and most interesting pendant. It has been compiled from a very confused mass of MS. notes ; but its purpose is unmistakeable as having been intended as an accompaniment to the engraving of Chaucer's Pilgrims. Both the Catalogue and Address abound in critical passages on painting and poetry, which must be ranked without reserve among the very best things ever said on either subject. Such inestimable qualities afford quite sufficient ground whereon to claim indulgence for eccentricities which are here and there laughably excessive, but which never fail to have a personal, even where they have no critical, value. As evidence of the writer's many moods, these pieces of prose are much best left unmutilated. Let us, therefore, risk misconstruction in some quarters; there are others where even the whimsical onslaughts on names no less great than those which the writer most highly honoured, and assertions as to this or that component quality of art being everything or nothing as it served the fiery plea in hand, will be discerned as the impatient extremes of a man who had his own work to do, which was of one kind, as he thought, against another, and who mainly did it too, in spite of that injustice without which no extremes might ever have been chargeable against him.