Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) A COMMONPLACE BOOK OF Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies. [Illustration] A COMMONPLACE BOOK— OF Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies. ORIGINAL AND SELECTED. PART I.—ETHICS AND CHARACTER. PART II.—LITERATURE AND ART. BY MRS. JAMESON. “Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout,—à la française!”—MONTAIGNE. With Illustrations and Etchings. SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS. 1855. [Illustration] PREFACE. I must be allowed to say a few words in explanation of the contents of this little volume, which is truly what its name sets forth—a book of common-places, and nothing more. If I have never, in any work I have ventured to place before the public, aspired to _teach_, (being myself a _learner_ in all things,) at least I have hitherto done my best to deserve the indulgence I have met with; and it would pain me if it could be supposed that such indulgence had rendered me presumptuous or careless. For many years I have been accustomed to make a memorandum of any thought which might come across me—(if pen and paper were at hand), and to mark (and _remark_) any passage in a book which excited either a sympathetic or an antagonistic feeling. This collection of notes accumulated insensibly from day to day. The volumes on Shakspeare’s Women, on Sacred and Legendary Art, and various other productions, sprung from seed thus lightly and casually sown, which, I hardly know how, grew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But what was to be done with the fragments which remained—without beginning, and without end—links of a hidden or a broken chain? Whether to preserve them or destroy them became a question, and one I could not answer for myself. In allowing a portion of them to go forth to the world in their original form, as unconnected fragments, I have been guided by the wishes of others, who deemed it not wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path, sometimes devious enough, of an “inquiring spirit,” even by the little pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way side.