ERRATA Page 22, line 12, for 'gailly' read' gaylie' or 'gaily.' 68,,, 3, for 'statlie' read 'statelie.' 98, at foot, for 'FLECKNO' readFLECKNOE.' ,, 102, line 12, after 'ty'd' insert (,). 6 13, after them' and 'Waine' insert (,). ,, 132, line 4 from foot, for are' read 'aire.' ,, 134, at foot, insert 'ANON.' PREFACE A NEW Treasury of British poetry might almost seem an impertinence, so numerous, and in many cases so excellent, are collections of this kind. To go no farther than Mr. Francis Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Dean Trench's Household Book of English Poetry, Mr. Locker-Lampson's Lyra Elegantiarum, and Mr. Humphry Ward's English Poets, are not these, it may be asked, all that lovers of poetry could desire, and are not these in everybody's hands? I, for one, should certainly reply in the affirmative, and I should no more think of entering into competition with them than I should think of re-gathering and presenting again the flowers of their anthologies. If this collection has any relation to them it is that of the aftermath to the full harvest, of the gleaner to the binder of the sheaves. But I modestly claim for this little volume an independent place. It is an experiment, and it is, so far as I know, an experiment which has not been attempted before. The principle on which the poems have been selected, and the principle on which they have been arranged, I must ask permission to explain fully and precisely, and this is the more necessary as my book, unfortunately, labours under the disadvantage of being very imperfectly described by its title. It is commonly objected to anthologies that they copy each other, that they travel in a round, that the same poets, |