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Synopsis In an enquiry embracing the history of motives, causes, and ends, it is often far less important to dwell on "leading" personalities and on the main tendencies of literary production, than to consider subsidiary movements and writers below the highest rank, and to trace, in apparently arid periods, processes which were often carried on, as it were, underground, or seemed to be such there are few, if any, isolated, phenomena; the voices may be voices carrying in the wilderness, but they belong to those who prepare the way. While therefore, anxious that not less than justice shall be dealt out to the works of better known writers, the editors have tried so to plan these volumes that something more than the mere justice with which works designed on a smaller scale have had to content themselves may be given to less known writers and to so-called fugitive literature.