Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/16

Athenæum an estimate of the loss English Letters have sustained by the death of the four chief writers who left us during the decade. These essays differed, I believe, in at least two respects from the obituary notices which swarm from the press on such occasions. They were estimates, not obituaries; they dealt rather with the work than with the life of each author. And they were written immediately on hearing of the death of the writer concerned, whereas it is well known that every newspaper has obituaries of all the notabilities of the time pigeon-holed for production on the morrow of the death. Whatever then the merits of these essays, they were written under the influence of the feelings I have indicated above, and were in each case, I may perhaps say, the first critical estimate of contemporary England on the lifework of these great writers. That they appeared in the foremost literary journal of the English-speaking peoples gives them an importance that I could not claim for any personal utterances. I have for these reasons thought them worthy of being put in more permanent form as documents—'documents' is a favourite word and thing just now—in the history of English opinion about the writers treated in this volume. At the same time I have thought it right to leave them in substantially the same form as that in which they first appeared, only removing a few traces of neces-