PREFACE

This volume of Modern English Prose grows out of materials we have used for classroom readings in the last few years. It was first published two years ago to meet an urgent demand for textbooks in our colleges and universities. Since then we have received much encouragement by its warm reception and a number of valuable suggestions for its improvement from various quarters. Now that there is a call for a second edition, we have taken the chance to enlarge it and make whatever modifications and corrections that are necessary.

In undertaking the selection of these essays, we have kept constantly in view two aims: First, they are to serve as model essays for classroom perusal and imitation. Within the page limits we have endeavoured to present the best, and nothing but the best, of the prose masters of the two great centuries. Second, it is hoped that a study of these specimens will stimulate a deeper interest on the part of the readers in a field which is by far the most fertile of English prose.

In a sense this volume is unique. Instead of making it representative of all types of English prose writings, we have included in it only one type of prose, the Informal Essay, which attained the perfectness of form in the hands of Steele and Addison, reached the culmination of its splendour in Lamb and Hazlitt, and retained much of its exuberance in the inimitable writings of Stevenson and Ruskin who closed the past century. On this account we are forced to make many omissions and exclusions. It is regrettable that some great names, especially of the nineteenth century, have to be left out from this collection.

In preparing this revised edition, we have introduced some new essays and authors and verified the texts, making them reasonably accurate. We have also added many new entries in the Notes, which have now grown to a considerable size. But there is hardly any scholarly pretense. We have drawn freely on the learning of our predecessors who by their arduous and noble labour have added copiously to an understanding and appreciation of these essays. What little contributions we have been able to make are therefore quite insignificant in view of the great mass of borrowings, which are too many to be enumerated.

Our thanks are due to our colleagues and others who have helped us in the making of these selections. We are also grateful to Mr. John Blofeld,Cultural Attache of the British Embassy in Chungking, who has kindly made the arrangement for a generous grant from the British Council in London, without which the publication of this new edition would be practically impossible.

Tsen-Chung Fan

Wu-Chi Liu

National Central University,

Chungking.

June 6, 1944.