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In: Harvard Classics·Essays, Letters & Speeches
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #13182.
This volume gathers a series of prefatory and concluding remarks that originally introduced works ranging from medieval translations of Trojan legends to early modern philosophical compilations. It opens with a reflective essay on the intimate nature of a preface, followed by William Caxton’s own prologues and epilogues to his translations of the Recuyell of the Histories of Troy and the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers. The editor’s introductory note explains how each statement, though detached from its parent text, reveals the author’s personality, ambitions, and the cultural climate of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The book therefore functions as a curated anthology of authorial voices, each presented in its original early‑English spelling and punctuation, offering a window into the mindset of printers, translators, and scholars who shaped early English literature.
The language is unmistakably Tudor, marked by formal diction, elaborate sentence structures, and frequent appeals to divine authority. Readers who enjoy historical linguistics, the evolution of literary criticism, or the social history of the printing press will find the collection rewarding. It appeals especially to scholars of early English prose, bibliophiles interested in the material conditions of book‑making, and anyone curious about how writers once addressed their audiences directly, before the modern notion of authorial anonymity took hold.
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_No part of a book is so intimate as the Preface. Here, after the long labor of the work is over, the author descends from his platform, and speaks with his reader as man to man, disclosing his hopes and fears, seeking sympathy for his difficulties, offering defence or defiance, according to his temper, against the criticisms which he anticipates. It thus happens that a personality which has been veiled by a formal method throughout many chapters, is suddenly seen face to face in the Preface; and this alone, if there were no other reason, would justify a volume of Prefaces.
But there are other reasons why a Preface may be presented apart from its parent work, and may, indeed, be expected sometimes to survive it. The Prologues and Epilogues of Caxton were chiefly prefixed to translations which have long been superseded; but the comments of this frank and enthusiastic pioneer of the art of printing in England not only tell us of his personal tastes, but are in a high degree illuminative of the literary habits and standards of western Europe in the fifteenth century. Again, modern research has long ago put Raleigh's "History of the World" out of date; but his eloquent Preface still gives us a rare picture of the attitude of an intelligent Elizabethan, of the generation which colonised America, toward the past, the present, and the future worlds. Bacon's "Great Restoration" is no longer a guide to scientific method; but his prefatory statements as to his objects and hopes still offer a lofty inspiration.
And so with the documents here drawn from the folios of Copernicus and Calvin, with the criticism of Dryden and Wordsworth and Hugo, with Dr. Johnson's Preface to his great Dictionary, with the astounding manifesto of a new poetry from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"--each of them has a value and significance independent now of the work which it originally introduced, and each of them presents to us a man._
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