The present volume contains Nietzsche's latest essays, the publications of 1888. The sub-title given to the "Twilight of the Idols," namely, "How to Philosophise with a Hammer," applies equally well to the entire volume, which deals exclusively in destructive criticism. The "idols" upon which Nietzsche here exercises the hammer of a singularly comprehensive iconoclasm are those of modern democratic civilisation. The editor of the series is Dr. Tille, Lecturer on German Language and Literature in the University of Glasgow, and author of "Von Darwin bis Nietzsche," a book that has attracted some attention in Germany. No explanation is offered of the motives which prompted the choice of Nietzsche's latest works for the first volume of the English edition. The history of Nietzsche's life since 1876 is the history of a tragic struggle. In that year he attended the Bayreuth festival, though in a weak state of health. The impression was overpowering, and henceforth the Wagnerian drama appeared to him in a new light. He conceived a horror of Wagner, but so deeply rooted in his affections was the Wagnerian art that with his belief in Wagner everything else that he had cared for was cast to the winds; he turned upon the religion of his childhood, the philosophy of his youth, the very land of his birth, and the only language that he really knew. Why, it may be asked, is the "Wagner Case," where the Bayreuth master figures as a "rattlesnake," offered to readers who have had no means of access to the earlier essay by the same writer called "Wagner in Bayreuth," an utterance of enthusiastic discipleship and probably the most discerning appreciation of Wagner ever yet published? Again, in the early essay on "Schopenhauer as Educator," one of the "Inopportune Contemplations," Nietzsche reckons himself among those readers of Schopenhauer who know almost from the outset that they have encountered a determining influence; and, indeed, so saturated is Nietzsche with Schopenhauer's ideas that he cannot get rid of the Schopenhauer terminology even in his later writings, where Schopenhauer has become an "old false-coiner." The expression "Wille zur Macht," an obvious modification of Schopenhauer's "Wille zum Leben," continually recurs even in Nietzsche's latest writings, and was to have formed the title of an entire book in his projected work "The Transvaluation of all Values." The same early work contains a passage in which Christianity is called one of the purest examples of the striving after perfection to be found in the history of mankind, while the "Antichrist," the last essay in the volume now before us, is a new and more formidable version of the Voltairian "Ecrasez l'Infâme," a furious denunciation not merely of Christian dogma, but also, and more especially, of the ethical principles that are the essence of the Christian system for the modern world. All these recantations thus appear with scarcely a hint of the antecedent confessions of faith.