X PREFACE. 



music. The same holds good more or less with all 

 composers. Handel's works were not numbered — not 

 at least his operas and oratorios. Had they been so, 

 the significance of the numbers on Susanna and Theo- 

 dora would have been at once apparent, connected as 

 they would have been with the number on Jephthah, 

 Handel's next and last work, in which he emphatically 

 repudiates the influence which, perhaps in a time of 

 self-distrust, he had allowed contemporary German 

 music to exert over him. Many painters have dated 

 their works, but still more have neglected doing so, 

 and some of these have been not a little misconceived 

 in cons'equence. As for authors, it is unnecessary to 

 go farther back than Lord Beaconsfield, Thackeray, 

 Dickens, and Scott, to feel how much obliged we should 

 have been to any custom that should have compelled 

 them to number their works in the order in which 

 they were written. When we think of Shakespeai-e, 

 any doubt which might remain as to the advantage of 

 the proposed innovation is felt to disappear. 



My friends, to whom I urged all the above, and more, 

 met me by saying that the practice was doubtless a 

 very good one in the abstract, but that no one was par- 

 ticularly likely to want to know in what order my 

 books had been written. To which I answered that 

 even a bad book which introduced so good a custom 

 would not be without value, though the value might 

 lie in the custom, and not in the book itself; whereon, 

 seeing that I was obstinate, they left me, and inter- 

 preting their doing so into at any rate a modified appro- 

 bation of my design, I have carried it into practice. 



