xviii INTRODUCTION 



The sketch is written on bad paper with a soft 

 pencil, and is in many parts extremely difficult to 

 read, many of the words ending in mere scrawls and 

 being illegible without context. It is evidently 

 written rapidly, and is in his most elliptical style, the 

 articles being frequently omitted, and the sentences 

 being loosely composed and often illogical in struc- 

 ture. There is much erasure and correction, appa- 

 rently made at the moment of writing, and the MS. 

 does not give the impression of having been re-read 

 with any care. The whole is more like hasty memo- 

 randa of what was clear to himself, than material 

 for the convincing of others. 



Many of the pages are covered with writing on 

 the back, an instance of his parsimony in the matter 

 of paper 1 . This matter consists partly of passages 

 marked for insertion in the text, and these can gener- 

 ally (though by no means always) be placed where 

 he intended. But he also used the back of one page 

 for a preliminary sketch to be rewritten on a clean 

 sheet. These parts of the work have been printed 

 as footnotes, so as to allow what was written on the 

 front of the pages to form a continuous text. A 

 certain amount of repetition is unavoidable, but 

 much of what is written on the backs of the pages 

 is of too much interest to be omitted. Some of the 

 matter here given in footnotes may, moreover, have 

 been intended as the final text and not as the 

 preliminary sketch. 



When a word cannot be deciphered, it is replaced 

 by: (illegible), the angular brackets being, as already 

 explained, a symbol for an insertion by the editor. 

 More commonly, however, the context makes the 

 interpretation of a word reasonably sure although 

 the word is not strictly legible. Such words are 

 followed by an inserted mark of interrogation (?). 



1 Life and Letters, i. p. 153. 



