To bring home and render so great a spoil
compendiously has been my capital difficulty. It is for the reader
to judge if I have so managed it as to serve those who already
love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet
initiated.
My scheme is simple. I have arranged the poets as nearly as
possible in order of birth, with such groupings of anonymous
pieces as seemed convenient. For convenience, too, as well as to
avoid a dispute-royal, I have gathered the most of the Ballads
into the middle of the Seventeenth Century; where they fill a
languid interval between two winds of inspiration--the Italian
dying down with Milton and the French following at the heels of
the restored Royalists. For convenience, again, I have set myself
certain rules of spelling. In the very earliest poems inflection
and spelling are structural, and to modernize is to destroy. But
as old inflections fade into modern the old spelling becomes less
and less vital, and has been brought (not, I hope, too abruptly)
into line with that sanctioned by use and familiar. To do this
seemed wiser than to discourage many readers for the sake of
diverting others by a scent of antiquity which--to be essential--
should breathe of something rarer than an odd arrangement of type.
But there are scholars whom I cannot expect to agree with me; and
to conciliate them I have excepted Spenser and Milton from the
rule.
Glosses of archaic and otherwise difficult words are given at
the foot of the page: but the text has not been disfigured with
reference-marks.
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