This book is a selection, slightly revised, from my miscellaneous work during the last four or five years, and the title is that under which the bulk of it has appeared, month by month, in the "Pall Mall Magazine." In selecting, I have omitted those pieces which hang upon other people's books, plays, or pictures—a process of exclusion which, while giving unity to a possible collection of my critical writings in another volume, leaves the first selection exclusively egoistic.