VALEDICTORY.[1]

[Footnote 1:  On the writer’s retirement from the editorship of the Fortnightly Review, in 1882.]

The present number of the Review marks the close of a task which was confided to me no less than fifteen years ago—­grande mortalis cevi spatium, a long span of one’s mortal days.  Fifteen years are enough to bring a man from youth to middle age, to test the working value of convictions, to measure the advance of principles and beliefs, and, alas! to cut off many early associates and to extinguish many lights.  It is hardly possible that a Review should have been conducted for so considerable a time without the commission of some mistakes; articles admitted which might as well have been left out, opinions expressed which have a crudish look in the mellow light of years, phrases dropped in the heat or hurry of the moment which one would fain obliterate.  Many a regret must rise in men’s minds on any occasion that compels them to look back over a long reach of years.  The disparity between aim and performance, the unfulfilled promise, the wrong turnings taken at critical points—­as an accident of the hour draws us to take stock of a complete period of our lives, all these things rise up in private and internal judgment against anybody who is not either too stupid or too fatuously complacent to recognise facts when he sees them.  But the mood passes.  Time, happily, is merciful, and men’s memories are benignly short.

More painful is the recollection of those earlier contributors of ours who have vanished from the world.  Periodical literature is like the manna in the wilderness; it quickly loses its freshness, and to turn over thirty volumes of old Reviews can hardly be exhilarating at the best:  least of all so, when it recalls friends and coadjutors who can give their help no more.  George Henry Lewes, the founder of the Review, and always cordially interested in its fortunes, has not survived to see the end of the reign of his successor, His vivacious intelligence had probably done as much as he was competent to do for his generation, but there were other important contributors, now gone, of whom this could not be said.  In the region of political theory, the loss of J.E.  Cairnes was truly lamentable and untimely.  He had, as Mill said of him, “that rare qualification among writers on political and social subjects—­a genuine scientific intellect.”  Not a month passes in which one does not feel how great an advantage it would have been to be able to go down to Blackheath, and discuss the perplexities of the time in that genial and manly companionship, where facts were weighed with so much care, where conclusions were measured with such breadth and comprehension, and where even the great stolid idols of the Cave and the Market Place were never too rudely buffeted.  Of a very different order of mind from Cairnes, but not less to be permanently regretted by all of us who knew