A preface generally begins with a truism, and I may set out with the mission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the posthumous work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish during his lifetime quite as much as the public has time or inclination to read, and his surviving friends are apt to show more zeal than discretion in dragging forth from his closed desk such undeveloped offspring of his mind as he himself had left to silence. Literature has never been redundant with authors who sincerely undervalue their own productions, and the sagacious critics who maintain that what of his own an author condemns must be doubly damnable are, to say the least of it, as often likely to be right as wrong. Beyond these general remarks, however, it does not seem necessary to adopt an apologetic attitude. There is nothing in the present volume which anyone possessed of brains and cultivation will not be thankful to read. The appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings is more intelligent and widespread than it used to be, and the later development of our national literature has not perhaps so entirely exhausted our resources of admiration as to leave no welcome for even the less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As regards Dr. Grimshaw's Secret, the title which, for lack of a better, has been given to this romance, it can scarcely be pronounced deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could not have failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had looked forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary career. In the preface to Our Old Home, he alludes to it as a work into which he proposed to convey more of various modes of truth than he could have grasped by a direct effort. But circumstances prevented him from perfecting the design which had been before his mind for seven years, and upon the shaping of which he bestowed more thought and labor than upon anything else he had undertaken. The successive and consecutive series of notes or studies which he wrote for this romance would of themselves make a small volume, and one of autobiographical as well as literary interest. There is no other instance that I happen to have met with in which a writer's thought reflects itself upon paper so immediately and sensitively as in these studies. To read them is to look into the man's mind and see its quality and action, the penetration, the subtlety, the tenacity, the stubborn gripe which he lays upon his subject like that of Hercules upon the slippery old man of the sea, the clear and cool common controlling the audacity of a rich and ardent imagination, the humorous jibes and strange expletives wherewith he ridicules to himself his own failure to reach his goal, the immense patience with which