The definition, if he be clever
enough to frame one, comes by after-thought. I don't know that it
helps, and am sure that it may easily mislead.
Having set my heart on choosing the best, I resolved not to be
dissuaded by common objections against anthologies--that they
repeat one another until the proverb [Greek] loses all
application--or perturbed if my judgement should often agree with
that of good critics. The best is the best, though a hundred
judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out
and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be
recondite. To be sure, a man must come to such a task as mine
haunted by his youth and the favourites he loved in days when he
had much enthusiasm but little reading.
A deeper import
Lurks in the legend told my infant years
Than lies upon that truth we live to learn.
Few of my contemporaries can erase--or would wish to erase--the
dye their minds took from the late Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury:
and he who has returned to it again and again with an affection
born of companionship on many journeys must remember not only what
the Golden Treasury includes, but the moment when this or that
poem appealed to him, and even how it lies on the page. To Mr.
Bullen's Lyrics from the Elizabethan Song Books and his other
treasuries I own a more advised debt. Nor am I free of obligation
to anthologies even more recent--to Archbishop Trench's Household
Book of Poetry, Mr.
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