_NOTE_
_In the pages that here follow I have gathered up such of my more or
less critical contributions to various Reviews, and to one great daily
paper, as I am least unwilling to preserve within the covers of a book._
_As the proportion borne by things reprinted from the ‘Standard’
will seem small to those who know during how many years I have been
permitted to contribute to its columns the expression of opinion on
many of those arts which have been both my delight and my laborious
study, let me just simply say that every line that I have written in
that paper has been written with a single eye to the needs of the
occasion and the moment, and the more expressly any writing is designed
for a particular need and place, the less, I think, is it adapted for
transplanting._
_There has been no attempt to bring these essays, or these fragments,
‘up-to-date’--to bring them to the point of view, I mean, of the time
at which they chance to be republished. A suppression here, and there
the alteration of a phrase--little else is attempted. They remain,
frankly, ‘contributions.’_
_F. W._
_Westminster, October 1899._