The essays which appear in the following pages were first issued, above the pseudonym of "Self-Help," in a number of provincial weekly newspapers. Certainly when I began to write them I had no idea of the pleasure and surprise in store for me. The pleasure came when the first few weekly numbers of letters from correspondents expressing the kindest sympathy in my scheme, and warm thanks for my first essays. My surprise has steadily increased from then to now-surprise that my hastily written sketches should have stimulated so much genuine enthusiasm, not only among young men and women with an ambition for learning and culture, but among readers of riper years and of more critical authority; surprise also that they should have found their way to the four quarters of the globe, and among so many varying classes of readers. They have been read and discussed by the camp-fires of South Africa; they have been passed from hand to hand in the China Squadron; they have afforded the evening reading of settlers in the Back-woods of Canada; they have been studied with the aid of a pipe and the contents of a "billy" in the Australian Bush; while throughout the British Isles many a solitary student has hailed them with a cordiality whose expression has gladdened the heart of the writer.
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