SOURCE: An introduction to Selected Letters of George Edward Woodberry, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933, pp. ix-xxv.

In the following essay, de la Mare describes who Woodberry was, as reflected in his letters and other writings.

In a brief paper on Thackeray's letters, written in Woodberry's earlier years, he remarked how often and how easily biography may distort the truth, and may mislead its readers concerning the very man whom it was intended to reveal. 'A quarrel that was but an incident of a lifetime becomes a long episode in the book … an imprudent witticism, a blunder in some fit of dullness, a piece of self-deception mat was only momentary, and all the thousand and one superficial matters that fill the day are brought into prominence, as if they, and not the spirit that underwent these crosses, were the life itself. But the real man is in his books.'...