tained by glasses other than inkstands having
been placed upon them. 'Within that circle none dared walk but he,' said
Tom Hood in his genially humorous way; and many of these thoughts were
thus partially or wholly encircled. Pages of articles that had already
been printed were intermixed with others that had not; and the first
piece of work that I entered on was roughly to separate the printed from
the unprinted--first having carefully copied out from the former any of
the spidery-looking notes interjected there, to which I have already
referred. The next process was to arrange the many separate pages and
seeming fragments into heaps, by subjects; and finally to examine these
carefully and, with a view to 'connections,' to place them together. In
not a few cases where the theme was attractive and the prospect
promising, utter failure to complete the article or sketch was the
result, the opening or ending passages, or a page in the middle, having
been unfortunately destroyed or lost.

So numerous were these notes, so varied their subjects, that one got
quite a new idea of the extreme electrical quality of his mind, as he
himself called it; and I shall have greatly failed in my endeavour in
the case of these volumes, if I have not succeeded in imparting
something of the same impression to the reader. Here we have proof that
vast schemes, such as the great history of England, of which Mr. James
Hogg, senr., humorously told us in his 'Recollections' ('Memoir,' ch.
ed., pp. 330, 331), were not merely subjects of conversation and jest,
but that he had actually proceeded to build up masses of notes and
figures with a view to these; and various slips and pages remain to show
that he had actually commenced to write the history of England. The
short article, included in the present volume, on the 'Power of the
House of Commons as Custodian of the Purse,' is marked for 'My History
of England.' Other portions are marked as intended for 'My book on the
Infinite,' and others still 'For my book on the Relations of
Christianity to Man.' One can infer, indeed, that several of the
articles well-known to us, notably 'Christianity as an Organ of
Political Movement,' for one, were originally conceived as portions of a
great work on 'Christianity in Relation to Human Development.'

It is thus necessary to be very explicit in stating that, though these
notes are as faithfully reproduced as has been possible to me, the
classification and arr