The essays contained in this book are not intended to give information.
They are concerned with ideas rather than with facts; each is a study
of a problem, only in part a literary one, in which I have endeavoured
to consider writers as personalities under the action of spiritual
forces, or as themselves so many forces. But it has seemed to me that
readers have a right to demand information in regard to writers who are
so often likely to be unfamiliar to them. I have, therefore, given a
bibliography of the works of each writer with whom I have dealt, and
I have added a number of notes, giving various particulars which I
think are likely to be useful in fixing more definitely the personal
characteristics of these writers.