Mrs. Caliban begged me to add a few words on “Special Prose,” and to subjoin an example of that manner. She has suggested for the latter purpose Mrs. Railston’s “Appreciation of William Shakespeare,” written as a preface for the Charing Cross Shakespeare in 1897. She has even been at the pains of asking Mrs. Railston’s leave to have it included in this volume, a permission that was at once granted, accompanied with the courteous request that Mrs. Railston’s name, address, and private advertisement should accompany the same. Were I dependent upon my own judgment alone, the wisdom of adding such a division at the close of these essays might seem doubtful. Special Prose is an advanced kind of literature, too great an attraction to which might at first confuse rather than aid the student; and I should hardly make a place for it in a straightforward little Text-book. Mrs. Caliban’s wishes in all matters concerning this work must be observed, and I have done what she desired me, even to the degree of printing Mrs. Railston’s advertisement, though I am certain that great Authoress does herself harm by this kind of insistence ... It is no business of mine.... It is only fair to add that prose of this sort _is_ the highest form of our Art, and should be the ultimate goal of every reader of this Guide. If, however, the student is bewildered in his first attempt to decipher it (as he very well may be), my advice to him is this: let him mark the point to which he has persevered, and then put the whole thing aside until he has had some little further practice in English letters. Then let him return, fresh from other work, some weeks later, and see if he cannot penetrate still further into the close-knit texture. Soon he will find it almost like his own tongue, and will begin to love and to understand. Not many months will pass before it will mean to him something more than life, as he once imagined, could contain. Having said so much, let me hasten to obey Mrs. Caliban’s command. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. _An Appreciation._ BY MARGARET RAILSTON. How very manifestly well did not Montaigne (I think it was) say in his essay upon Value that the “inner part of Poesy is whilom hid, whilom bare, and it matters little whether it be bare or hidden.” That was a sentence such as our Wordsworth might have quoted at the high court of Plato when the poets were arraigned as unworthy to be rooted in his Republic. For the most part these dear poets of our tongue will rather have it bare than hidden, leaving the subtleties of “The Misanthrope” to another race, and themselves preferring the straight verbal stab of “The Idiot Boy” or “Danny Deever;” so that many of us see nothing in the Rhymed Heroics of the Grand Siècle. Yet Molière also had genius. “Molière a du génie et Christian été beau.”