Hon. Member of the Academy of Fine Arts, Florence; London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1887 The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved PREFACE. SOME men live before their age, others behind it. My father did both. In action he was behind the world, or rather apart from it; in thought he was far before his time-a thinker who may probably lead the next generations even more than his own. A great and deep student of the past, he drew from it inferences and teaching for the future. The reading world know him chiefly for his poems -but the making of poems was but a small part of his intellectual life. His most earnest studies and greatest aims were in philology; but he was also a keen thinker in social science and political economy. For one hand to do justice to all the phases of a many-sided mind is not an easy task, and no one can feel more than I do my own inadequacy to it. Although perfectly aware that there are many others who would have made a worthier book in its literary aspect, yet when the work of biographer was given to me I gladly undertook it, knowing my father's wishes as to the spirit in which it should be done. He always had a great repugnance to be "written about," and though he so far recognised the possibility of a future necessity for his life to be given to the public as to collect and arrange notes, memoranda, letters, etc., as data for the writer, yet he always refused to commit this material into other hands. On my last visit to England I was one day walking with him in the garden at Came, and begged to be allowed to take his note-books back with me to begin writing his life, but he shrank from it, saying, must be done, I would rather one of my own children should do it, but not now-leave me to my quietude while I live." Again, in his last illness, when speaking with his son, the Rev. W. Miles Barnes, he requested that if his life were written the facts should be simply and plainly adhered to, and not obscured or glossed over by "fine writing." If it It is this wish that I have tried to fulfil, and have merely given the true events of a pure and simple life, in as plain and unglossed a manner as possible. No criticism of works has been attempted; indeed what has been done so fully and appreciatively by abler hands would be out of place, from a daughter -there is only a slight description of them, and as much of their inner story as I knew. I regret that the Life could not have been written in a more joyous spirit whilst he was still with us, but as far as possible it has been my aim not to |