no few cases, political pieces have
entered into the generally admitted stock of the best literary things.
If they are little read, can we honestly say that other things in the
same rank are read much more? And is there not the further plea, by no
means contradictory, nor even merely alternative, that the best
examples of them are, as a rule, merged in huge collected 'Works,' or,
in the case of authors who have not attained to that dignity, simply
inaccessible to the general? At any rate my publishers have consented
to let me try the experiment of gathering certain famous things of the
sort in this volume, and the public must decide.

I do not begin very early, partly because examples of the Elizabethan
political pamphlet, or what supplied its place, will be given in
another volume of the series exclusively devoted to the pamphlet
literature of the reigns of Eliza and our James, partly for a still
better reason presently to be explained. On the other hand, though
another special volume is devoted to Defoe, the immortal _Shortest Way
with the Dissenters_ is separated from the rest of his work, and given
here. Most of the contents, however, represent authors not otherwise
represented in the series, and though very well known indeed by name,
less read than quoted. The suitableness of the political pamphlet,
both by size and self-containedness, for such a volume as this, needs
no justification except that which it, like everything else, must
receive, by being put to the proof of reading.

There is no difficulty in showing, with at least sufficient critical
exactness, why it is not possible or not desirable to select examples
from very early periods even of strictly modern history. The causes
are in part the same as those which delayed the production of really
capital political verse (which has been treated in another volume),
but they are not wholly the same. The Martin Marprelate pamphlets are
strictly political; so are many things earlier, later, and
contemporary with them, by hands known and unknown, great and small,
skilled and unskilled; so are some even in the work of so great a man
as Bacon. But very many things were wanting to secure the conditions
necessary to the perfect pamphlet. There was not the political
freedom; there was not the public; there was not the immediate object;
there was not, last and most of all, the style. Political utterances
under a more or less despotic, or, as the modern euphemism goes,
'