ΟΝ LANGUAGE, AND Other Papers, BY ROWLAND G. HAZARD. EDITED BY E. P. PEABODY. BOSTON: PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY. 1857. P In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. Stereotyped by New England Type and Stereotype Foundery, BOSTON. EDITOR'S PREFACE. THE collection of Mr. Hazard's writings, now offered to the public, has been made at the earnest instance of his friends. Most of these papers, called forth by occasions, have been rather printed than published, heretofore. They were the productions not even of the leisure of their author; for he has had no leisure – having been always entirely engaged with a very extensive manufacturing and mercantile business. It is of the Essay on Language, which begins the collection, that the late William E. Channing, D.D., speaks in the following paragraph of his lecture on Self-culture : "I have known a man of vigorous intellect, who had enjoyed few advantages of early education, and whose mind was almost engrossed by the details of an extensive business, but who composed a book, of much original thought, in steamboats and on horseback, while visiting distant customers." The editor of these papers remembers Dr. Channing's reading of this essay, when it was first published; and his efforts to discover the anonymous author, whose want of literary experience, evinced in the composition of it, was an interesting contrast, he thought, with his extraordinary powers of delicate observation and analysis, in a region only to be penetrated at all by the 33 X 116 |