PREFACE TO THIS EDITION. HIS is the third edition of the First and having said this, what more can I say but that I am surprised and grateful; that I find nobody likes my title, and that I agree with everybody who doesn't; that I wish I had called it anything else-Odds and Ends, Papers, Diversions, Miscellanies, Nuga, or any of those many nicknames which parental fondness and conceit devises for its offspring "in luxury of disrespect," rather than these semi-pedantic Hora Subseciva;1 that this wish 1 It is curious the number of books having this title, from the dull and wholesome volume " printed for Edward is useless now, and that, like Mutton-hole or Mr. Muggeridge, I must submit to my name and its penalties; that the "Excursus Ethicus" is moved into volume second; and that the paper on "Education through the Senses" is new, and perhaps too high-pitched, and would have been none the worse of a specific disclaimer of any wish to disparage the teaching of the classics, which I hope I shall always look upon as at once a discipline and a philosophy, a knowledge and an instrument of search, and one of the best joys of old age, and for whose want in humane culture nothing can make Blount, and to be sold at his shope in Paul's Churchyard, at the signe of the Black Beare, 1620,” down to the small volume of our subtle Dr. Fletcher, published five-and-twenty years ago. Perhaps some industrious and knowing contributor to the admirable Notes and Queries, may be able to tell us how many Hora Subseciva our language contains. I have a copy of those printed for Mr. Blount, on the title-page of which is written in a contemporary hand " by ye Lord Candish, after Earle of Devonshire,' and in another corrective hand of the same age, "by Gilbert Lord Candish, eldest son of Wm. 1st Earl of Devonshire, but ye Ld. Candish died in ye lifetime of his father." |