ENGLISH, PAST AND PRESENT. FIVE LECTURES. BY RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, B.D. VICAR OF ITCHENSTOKE, HANTS; EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD; SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED. LONDON: JOHN W. PARKER AND SON, WEST STRAND, 1855. 302. C. 105. PREFACE. A SERIES of four lectures which I delivered last spring to the pupils of King's College School, London, supplied the foundation to this present volume. These lectures, which I was obliged to prepare in haste, on a brief invitation, and under the pressure of other engagements, being subsequently enlarged and recast, were delivered in the autumn somewhat more nearly in their present shape to the pupils of the Training School, Winchester; although of course with those alterations, omissions and additions, which the difference in my hearers suggested as necessary or desirable. I have found it convenient to keep the lectures, as regards the persons presumed to be addressed, in that earlier form which I had sketched out at the first; and, inasmuch as it helps much to keep lectures vivid and real that one should have some well defined audience, if not actually before one, yet before the mind's eye, to suppose myself throughout addressing my first hearers. I have supposed myself, that is, addressing a body of young Englishmen, all with a fair amount of classical knowledge (in my explanations I have sometimes had others with less than theirs in my eye), not wholly unacquainted |