_The writer of the following pages was a distant cousin of my own, and to a certain extent a friend. That is to say, I had stayed several times with him, and he had more than once visited me at my own home. I knew that he was obliged, for reasons of health, to live a very quiet and retired life; but he was not a man who appeared to be an invalid. He was keenly interested in books, in art, and above all in people, though he had but few intimate friends. He died in the autumn of 1900, and his mother, who was his only near relation, died in the following year; it fell to me to administer his estate, and among his papers I found this book, prepared in all essential respects for publication, though it is clear that it would not have seen the light in his lifetime. I submitted it to a friend of wide literary experience; his opinion was that the book had considerable interest, and illustrated a definite and peculiar point of view, besides presenting a certain attraction of style. I accordingly made arrangements for its publication; adding a few passages from the diary of the last days, which was composed subsequently to the date at which the book was arranged._ _I need hardly say that the names are throughout fictitious; and I will venture to express a hope that identification will not be attempted, because the book is one which depends for its value, not on the material circumstances of the writer, but upon the views of life which he formed._ THE HOUSE OF QUIET INTRODUCTORY _Christmas, Eve, 1898._ I have been a good deal indoors lately, and I have been amusing myself by looking through old papers and diaries of my own. It seems to me that, though the record is a very uneventful one, there is yet a certain unity throughout—I can hardly call it a conscious, definite aim, or dignify it by the name of a philosophy. But I have lived latterly with a purpose, and on a plan that has gradually shaped itself and become more coherent. It was formerly my ambition to write a book, and it has gone the way of most ambitions. I suppose I have not the literary temperament; I have not got the instinct for _form_ on a large scale. In the books which I have attempted to write, I have generally lost myself among details and abandoned the task in despair. I have never been capable of the _fundamental brainwork_; the _fundamental conception_ which Rossetti said made all the difference between a good piece of art and a bad one. When I was young, my idea of writing was to pile fine phrases together, and to think that any topic which occurred to my mind was pertinent to the matter in hand. Now that I am older, I have learnt that form and conception are not everything but nearly everything, and that a definite idea austerely presented is better than a heap of literary ornament.