spidery handwriting with many contractions--a kind of shorthand of his own, and very different indeed from his ordinary clean, clear, neat penmanship. In many cases these notes demanded no little care and closeness in deciphering--the more that the MSS. had been tumbled about, and were often deeply stained by glasses other than inkstands having been placed upon them. 'Within that circle none dared walk but he,' said Tom Hood in his genially humorous way; and many of these thoughts were thus partially or wholly encircled. Pages of articles that had already been printed were intermixed with others that had not; and the first piece of work that I entered on was roughly to separate the printed from the unprinted--first having carefully copied out from the former any of the spidery-looking notes interjected there, to which I have already referred. The next process was to arrange the many separate pages and seeming fragments into heaps, by subjects; and finally to examine these carefully and, with a view to 'connections,' to place them together. In not a few cases where the theme was attractive and the prospect promising, utter failure to complete the article or sketch was the result, the opening or ending passages, or a page in the middle, having been unfortunately destroyed or lost. So numerous were these notes, so varied their subjects, that one got quite a new idea of the extreme electrical quality of his mind, as he himself called it; and I shall have greatly failed in my endeavour in the case of these volumes, if I have not succeeded in imparting something of the same impression to the reader. Here we have proof that vast schemes, such as the great history of England, of which Mr. James Hogg, senr., humorously told us in his 'Recollections' ('Memoir,' ch. ed., pp. 330, 331), were not merely subjects of conversation and jest, but that he had actually proceeded to build up masses of notes and figures with a view to these; and various slips and pages remain to show that he had actually commenced to write the history of England. The short article, included in the present volume, on the 'Power of the House of Commons as Custodian of the Purse,' is marked for 'My History of England.' Other portions are marked as intended for 'My book on the Infinite,' and others still 'For my book on the Relations of Christianity to Man.' One can infer, indeed, that several of the articles well-known to us, notably 'Christianity as an Organ of Political Movement,' for one, were originally conceived as portions of a great work on 'Christianity in Relation to Human Development.'