PREFACE WITH these two volumes of Lectures and Essays I complete the task laid upon me by Canon Ainger's executors of editing his literary remains ; and I take the opportunity afforded by this preface to thank them for allowing me a free hand in the choice of what seemed best to publish, and to express the hope that I have not done my friend's reputation a disservice by printing or reprinting anything that he himself would have preferred to let die. The greater number of the Essays appeared in the pages of Macmillan's Magazine. One of them, bearing the title of " Books and their Uses," was contributed by its author, while still an undergraduate at Cambridge, to the first number of that magazine (Dec. 1859), under the signature of Doubleday (i.e. doubled A); and I have included it as a curiosity of literature, because it displays thus early not a few of the preferences, and perhaps a few of the prejudices also, with V 952 A295 V./ |