THIS selection of Lyrical Verse has been made to begin with Queen Elizabeth's reign, because, though there were some few fine lyrical pieces written under the immediate predecessors of the great Queen, no full collection of pre-Elizabethan lyrical verse could be made without swelling the dimensions of this volume beyond portability.

Moreover, omitting Chaucer, the popular poetic taste of the present generation hardly runs back even to verse written under the last Henry and the last Edward; and in truth only the literary archæologist can find pleasure in much that, between Chaucer and Shakespeare, was written by such minor poets as Lydgate or Gower and their inferiors.

Then again, the limits of this volume compel me to stop short at the threshold of the reign of our own Queen: the limits of the book and fear of the law of copyright.

The editor has another reason for not being too recent in his selections. We, who live in this age, are too much imbued with its spirit to do those poets who live in or near it critical justice. Death and Time-two or three generations at least-should come between the poet and any final judgment of his wares.

Contemporary criticism has constantly been proved by posterity to be, in the main, mistaken criticism. So late as fifteen years ago, a goodly volume of selections of the contemporary poetry of the twenty or thirty years previous to 1880 was published. Alas! of some fifty poets in this selection, at least forty have already passed into the limbo of oblivion, and of those whose names are still known, the poems quoted have mostly dropped out of memory. That book has been an object lesson to the present editor, and he has put fifty years between himself and the chances of another such blunder.

Of the method of selection followed there

is little to say. The principle is that of the

ancient Greek anthologies, of the admirable "Golden Treasury" of Palgrave, and of many modern anthologies before and since Palgrave's selection. The editor has tried to take the best and most characteristic lyrical verse of each poet, to avoid if possible repetition of the same sentiment, and to draw the difficult line between what is really lyrical (for a definition of which the reader is invited to seek elsewhere) and what is epic, idyllic, elegiac, descriptive, didactic, or dramatic. It is enough to say that song-not always and necessarily the song that can be set to music-is the staple of this volume; the ode is not excluded where it is eminently lyrical in tone, nor even the ballad, and the sonnet is largely quoted-the sonnet which is the sonata of poetry, the most artificial, the

most difficult, the most harmonious, in a true poet's hand, of all forms of lyrical verse, the master-key to the hearts of cultivated men, a form of lyric which, in this country at least, only the great master-poets have ever known how to handle rightly, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley.

Milton

The period of over 300 years that has elapsed since Elizabeth came to the throne has been divided into reigns, and the works of each poet have been set down under the sovereign in whose reign that poet fulfilled thirty years of his age. Few men have written much verse after forty, or much of value before twenty-five. The above arrangement has been broken in a few cases only. comes, in date, under Charles I. This austere Puritan and Politician belongs, however, by all poetical computation to the time of the Commonwealth. Byron and Moore came of poetic age under George III., but it was in the dotage of that monarch and during the regency of his successor that they chiefly wrote and flourished, and both these poets have the strongly in their works. ingly been promoted George IV.

Regency note very They have accordinto the reign of

The arrangement that I have adopted has many obvious advantages, but in some cases it works out oddly. Most of the wits of Queen Anne's reign entered their thirtieth year a little before or a little later than the twelve years' reign of that Queen; so that Swift and Prior, poets whom we connect with Queen Anne, come by virtue of their years under the reign

of William and Mary, and Pope, also essentially a Queen Anne poet, under George I.

As for the general principle of selection, I have not discarded poems that may be called hackneyed by some critics, but which the concurrent criticism of succeeding ages has canonised. The chief object, however, which I have had in view has been to make as full a collection of lyrics established in the approval of sound critics, and also to introduce as much comparatively unknown or little known lyrical verse as was possible. To make room for the pieces I have brought in I have ventured to omit a very few others that most educated readers know by heart.

In one point this collection differs from any English lyrical anthology that I know of. It contains a few poems that are marked chiefly by humour. The poem wherein lyrical expression and humour are combined is a rare product of English literature. I trust the poetical critic will not object to find "The Vicar of Bray”—that strong and finely ironical song of the early Georgian times-ranging with the lyrics of Blake and Wordsworth; the "Tullochgorum" of Skinner, which Burns admired beyond all written Scottish verse, set side by side with poems by Wordsworth and Shelley; and the milder and drawing-room humour of Praed, and the delightful jesting of Father Prout, alongside of the poems of Keats and Coleridge. OSWALD CRAWFURD.