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Two of the most illustrious names in the whole history of letters stand inscribed among theirs who have recorded their protest against the curious impertinence of research which insists on tracking, recovering, and preserving the slightest and least worthy fragments or remnants of a great man's work. It would be difficult to strike the balance of acrimony between the several rebukes administered to this surely not unnatural even if not wholly reasonable appetite of the mind, as habitual probably among grateful students as among 'curious impertinents,' by Voltaire on the one hand and by Landor on the other. And it was on the reissue in Scott's edition of all the miscellaneous work which did least honour to the hand and does least credit to the memory of Dryden that the great English critic and poet expended the sharpest expression of his fiery contempt. Yet something, I venture to think, may be pleaded on behalf of the curious in almost all cases of the kind. They are at least not parallel or comparable with such atrocious profanation of the inmost privacies and most secret sanctities of life and death as many years since was so grandly stigmatized by Lord Tennyson 'after reading a Life and Letters.' What a man has once given to the public eye is his no longer, to be taken back at pleasure or cancelled on change of mind. And whatever concerning in any way so great a name as Dryden's may be discovered and recorded at this distance