This is indeed now excellently supplied in at least one of the great schools of English, but there are still many who have great difficulty in obtaining the instruction that they need. It may be readily admitted that no amount of training will, in any branch of inquiry, make a competent researcher out of a student who has no natural talent in that direction. To those, however, with the requisite endowments it will certainly save much time, and it may save premature discouragement in the important first years of a student’s enthusiasm, when he feels that he has energy and life enough to undertake those longer tasks from which the man whose experience has been tediously acquired through many mistakes may well shrink. This Review will therefore not confine itself to the printing and criticism of work done; it will devote an important part of its space to the discussion of methods and to special articles intended to afford such instruction and information as may be useful to young students, and perhaps even to some of the older ones, in this field.
These then are some of the aims of those who have promoted this Review. But its success or failure does not lie in their hands, but in the hands of those who are interested in the study of English literature—in the hands of every one of them. If they will support it, make use of it, demanding from it what they require but bearing with its imperfections, at any rate in its early days, it will, before long, prove of real value for the progress of English studies. If not it will as surely fail.
