Excerpt from Life and Literature It is unnecessary to speak again of the service Lafcadio Hearn rendered to the West by his interpretations of Japan, nor of the service he rendered to the East in these lectures on Western literature. The editor would call attention once more, however, to the extraordinary quality of these lectures simply as literary criticism. Had they been addressed to an American audience, they would not have suggested, as they now do, the lonely and romantic adventure of Western cul ture in the Japanese classroom; but they would Still have de served our attention as one of the finest illustrations - cer tainly the illustration on the largest scale in English - of that kind of criticism which tries to interpret rather than to pass sentence. To be sure, a sympathetic explanation, in. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.