DEDICATION MY DEAR FATHER, 'Wild as they are, accept them.' So said our ancestor William Strachey in the verses which follow the dedication of his Virginian Travels to Francis Bacon. I will borrow his words in asking you to accept my Essays. That they are not rougher and wilder is due to you. With what infinite kindness and patience did you labour with me when I began to write. How well I recall how we two have sat in the Great Parlour at Sutton-the very place where John Locke once sat and talked of a Free Port with his friend John Strachey and hammered sense and simplicity out of a chaos of long sentences, and of periods which stopped not with the meaning, but 'only because the writer was out of breath.' Such memories are indeed for us an itinerary, for, wherever we were when I was a boy, you helped me to find the way to say what I wanted. Whether we were 'seated in hearing' of our Somersetshire rooks or of the great torrent that thunders through Promontogno, or in the Villa of the little Tower by the Mediterranean, it was all the same. Your readiness to help was invincible. I dare say I did not profit as much |