Before very long the skill in selecting and editing which had been first applied to Johnson’s Lives found extended opportunities.  Mr Arnold had much earlier, in the Essays in Criticism, expressed a wish that the practice of introducing books by a critical and biographical Essay, which had long been naturalised in France, and had in former times not been unknown in England, should be revived among us.  His words had been heard even before he himself took up the practice, and for about the usual time—­your thirty years is as a matter of fact your generation—­it flourished and prospered, not let us hope to the great detriment of readers, and certainly to the modest advantage of the public man when vexed by want of pence.  Nor can it exactly be said to have ceased—­though for some years grumbles have been uttered.  “Why,” says one haughty critic,—­“why mar a beautiful edition of So-and-so’s works by incorporating with them this or that man’s estimate of their value?” “The publishers,” says an inspired communique, “are beginning to recognise that the public has no need of such things in the case of works of established repute, of which there is nothing new to be said.”  No doubt both these are genuine utterances:  no doubt the haughty critic would have steadily refused to “mar” the book by his estimate if he had been asked to do so; no doubt the particular firm of publishers were not in the least influenced by a desire to save the ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred guineas which this or that man might have demanded for saying nothing new.

But Mr Arnold did not agree with these severe folk.  He thought—­and not a few good wits have thought with him—­not only that these Introductions are an opportunity for men like himself, with original gifts of thought and style, to display these gifts, but that the mighty public, for all its knowledge of everything that has been thought and said about everybody, might find something new to it even in the observations of lesser folk.  As a matter of fact, of course, and neither to talk nor to quote nonsense, the utility of such Introductions, even if moderately well done, is unmistakable.  Not one in a thousand of the probable readers of any book has all the information which even a fairly competent introducer will put before him; not one in a hundred knows the previous estimates of the author; not many possess that acquaintance with his whole work which it is part of the business of the introducer to acquire, and adjust for the better understanding of the particular book.  Of course, if an Introduction is imperfectly furnished with fact and thought and reading—­if it is desultory, in bad taste, and so forth—­it had better not be there.  But this is only saying that a bad Introduction is a bad thing, which does not get us much beyond the intellectual edification of the niece of Gorboduc.  Unless the introducer is a boggler, the Introduction will probably do good to those who want it and can be neglected by those who don’t; while in the rarer and better cases it will itself acquire, or even possess from the first, that very value as a point de repere which Mr Arnold had discussed.  It will be good relatively and good in itself,—­a contribution at once to the literature of knowledge and to the literature of power.