In editing these lectures for the volumes in which they first appeared, I tried to make as few alterations as possible. Only those manuscripts have been published which were fairly clear; all passages which were so mangled as to call for a reconstruction of the text, I omitted, and if the omission seemed to affect in any essential way what remained, I rejected the whole lecture. No additions whatever were made to the text; only the punctuation was made uniform, and the numerous quotations verified. Undaunted by many misprints and many oversights of my own in the citations of the four thick volumes, I have once more verified the quotations in this present book, and dare hope that few errors now survive. Allowing, therefore, for such mistakes as are incident to proofreading, the reader will find here a close record of Hearn's daily instruction to his Japanese class in English literature. The record is unique. I never read these chapters without marvelling at their simplicity, at the volume, if I may say so, of Hearn's critical faculty, and at the integrity of his character. The simplicity of the lectures is deceptive. The jaded book reviewer, coming, for example, on these transparent summaries or paraphrases of verse just quoted, feels that such repetitions may have aided the Japanese boys, but are only encumbrances for the reader born to the command of the English language. Against a judgment so shallow or so blind, I am somewhat put on my guard by my own experience with Hearn's lectures; for having been a student of the English language and a devoted lover of English poetry all my life, I am glad to acknowledge that Hearn's simple paraphrases of well-known poems have taught me truths about the poems which I never learned from the poems themselves, nor from critics of poetry to whom simplicity seems a fault. In editing these lectures of Hearn's, in this and the other volumes, I have had occasion to read every chapter many times, and I have read at least once the manuscripts which have not been printed. Simple as each lecture seems, the mass effect of them all, delivered day in and day out, on all the great themes of Western literature, is nothing short of titanic. In criticism as well as in creation, volume counts. To have a sound reasoned opinion of one book is beyond the power of the average reader. To be expert in all the writings of one author is to be a more than average critic. To know all the writers in one period is to be an authority. But to have so mature a knowledge of life and of art, so wide an outlook on experience and so philosophic a control of it, as to find consistently the meaning of any book, classic or modern, is to be among the few great critics, the few in whom criticism is a function and not an event. Hearn is, I believe, among the greatest of critics. It should be remembered also that his many lectures, all illustrating this high discrimination, were delivered in a foreign land, before a group of