_In_ The North American Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Galaxy, Lippincott's Magazine, The New York Tribune, The Independent _and some other periodicals, the authorship of such work was attributed to Mr. James on the publication of the articles or in regularly issued indexes._ _The articles in_ The Nation _are seldom signed, and there is no published index showing the contributors to its files. In preparing a recent[*] Bibliography of the writings of Henry James I had access to a record which the late Wendell Phillips Garrison, who was Mr. Godkin's associate from the founding of the paper and after 1881 editor in charge until June 28, 1906, had carefully kept of every author's work which his paper had published since its first issue. The amount of matter which Mr. James had provided, and the variety of interests concerning which he wrote, made an amazing array of notes. It is from the early issues of_ The Nation _that much of the contents of this volume is reprinted. Of Mr. James's contributions to periodicals those to this paper were perhaps the most notable as well as the most frequent. He was represented in its first number--July 6, 1865--by some critical notes on Henry W. Kingsley's novel_, "The Hillyars and the Bartons: A Story of Two Families," _under the title_, "The Noble School of Fiction," _and the name "Henry James" appears in the publisher's announced list of contributors to the early volumes. Many of these papers which first appeared in_ The Nation _have been reprinted, but few readers at this distance can realize how much the esteem in which that journal was immediately held under the editorial supervision of Mr. Godkin was due to perhaps its youngest regular contributor._ [*] _A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906_. _Volumes of the collected critical papers have already appeared_,--French Poets and Novelists, London: _1878, and_ Partial Portraits, _London: 1888, are the more notable,--but by far the greater part of these contemporary Essays on the literature of the late sixties and the seventies are now almost lost in the files of old or extinct periodicals._ _We are accustomed these later years to think of Mr. James as novelist rather than literary essayist and he has been cited by a recent writer as an author of fiction who becomes a critic on occasion and, he also adds, that his analytical system of novel writing excellently fits him for the office of critic; but, on the contrary, the papers in this volume seem to show that his early self-training as a critic has been the preparation for the creation of his characters in fiction._