I am afraid that this third and last volume of Caroline Poets must reverse the famous apology of the second of the monarchs from whom it derives its title. It has been an unconscionable time in being born; though I do not, to speak in character with my authors, know what hostile divinity bribed Lucina. I cannot blame any one else: and—though for the first ten years after the appearance of Vol. II I was certainly very busy, professionally and with other literary work—I do not think I omitted any opportunity of getting on with the book. I think I may say that if the time I have actually spent thereon at spare moments could be put together it would represent a full year's solid labour, if not more. I make neither complaint nor boast of this; for it has always been my opinion that a person who holds such a position as I then held should, if he possibly can, do something, in unremunerative and unpopular ways, to make the treasure of English literature more easily accessible. I have thoroughly enjoyed the work; and I owe the greatest thanks to the authorities of the Clarendon Press for making it possible.

But no efforts of mine, unless I had been able to reside in Oxford or London, would have much hastened the completion of the task: for the materials were hard to select, and, when selected, harder to find in copies that could be used for printing. Some of them we could not get hold of in any reasonable time: and the Delegates of the Press were good enough to have bromide rotographs of the Bodleian copies made for me. I worked on these as long as I could: but I found at last that the white print on black ground, crammed and crowded together as it is in the little books of the time, was not merely troublesome and painful, but was getting really dangerous, to my extremely weak eyesight.

This necessitated, or almost necessitated, some alterations in the scheme. One concerned the modernization of spelling, which accordingly will be found disused in a few later pieces of the volume; another, and more important one, the revision of the text. This latter was most kindly undertaken principally by Mr. Percy Simpson, who has had the benefit of Mr. G. Thorn-Drury's unrivalled knowledge of these minors. I could not think of cramping the hands of scholars so well versed as these were in seventeenth-century work: and they have accordingly bestowed rather more attention than had originally formed part of my own plan on apparatus criticus and comparison of MSS. The reader of course gains considerably in yet other respects. I owe these gentlemen, who may almost be called part-editors of this volume as far as text is concerned, very sincere thanks; and I have endeavoured as far as possible to specify their contributions.

When the war came the fortunes of the book inevitably received another check. The Clarendon Press conducted its operations in many other places besides Walton Street, and with many other instruments besides types and paper. Nor had its Home Department much time for such mere belles lettres as these. Moreover the loss of my own library, and the difficulties of compensating for that loss in towns less rich in books than Edinburgh, put further drags on the wheel. So I and my Carolines had to bide our time still: and even now it has been thought best to jettison a part of the promised cargo of the ship rather than keep it longer on the stocks.

The poets whom I had intended to include, and upon whom I had bestowed more or less labour, but who now suffer exclusion, were Heath, Flecknoe, Hawkins, Beedome, Prestwich, Lawrence, Pick, Jenkyn, and a certain 'Philander'. Of these I chiefly regret Heath—the pretty title of whose Clarastella is not ill-supported by the text, and who would have 'taken out the taste' of Whiting satisfactorily for some people—Hawkins, Lawrence, and Jenkyn. Henry Hawkins in Partheneia Sacra has attained a sort of mystical unction which puts him not so very far below Crashaw, and perhaps entitles him to rank with that poet, Southwell, and Chideock Tichborne earlier as the representative quartette of English Roman Catholic poetry in the major Elizabethan age. Lawrence's Arnalte and Lucetida, not a brilliant thing in itself, has real literary interest of the historical-comparative kind as representing a Spanish romance by Diego de San Pedro (best known as the author of the Carcel de Amor) and its French translation by Herberay, the translator of Amadis. But such things remain to be taken up by some general historian of the 'Heroic' Romance. As for 'Patheryke' [sic] Jenkyn he attracted me many years ago by the agreeable heterography of his name (so far preferable to more recent sham-Celticizings thereof) and held me by less fantastic merits. Flecknoe pleaded for a chance against the tyranny of 'glorious John'. But when it was a question between keeping these and the others with further delay and letting them go, there could not be much doubt in which way England expected this man to do his infinitesimal duty.

One instance, not of subtraction but of addition to the original contents, seems to require slight notice. The eye-weakness just mentioned having always prevented me from making any regular study of palaeography, I had originally proposed only to include work already printed. I was tempted to break my rule in the case of Godolphin: and made rather a mess of it. An errata list in the present volume (p. 552) will, I believe, repair the blunder. The single censurer of this (I further believe) single serious lapse of mine was, I remember, troubled about it as a discredit to the University of Oxford. I sincerely trust that he was mistaken. None of us can possibly do credit to our University; we can only derive it from her. To throw any discredit on her is equally impossible: though of course any member may achieve such discredit for himself. Let me hope that the balance against me for indiscreet dealing with perhaps one per cent. of my fifteen hundred or two thousand pages is not too heavy.

Little need be said of the actual constituents of the volume, which has however perhaps lost something of its intended 'composition', in the artistic sense, by losing its tail. A good English edition of Cleveland has long been wanted: and I think—the thought being stripped of presumption by the number and valiancy of my helpers—that we have at last given one. Stanley and King—truer poets than Cleveland, if less interesting to the general public—also called for fresh presentation. If anybody demurs to Flatman and still more to Whiting he must be left to his own opinion. I shall only note here that on Cleveland I was guilty of injustice to the Library of the University of Edinburgh (to which I owe much) by saying that it contained no edition of this reviler of Caledonia. None was discoverable in my time, the process of overhauling and re-cataloguing being then incomplete. But my friend and successor, Professor Grierson, tells me that one has since been found. As to King, I have recently seen doubts cast on his authorship of 'Tell me no more'. But I have seen no valid reasons alleged for them, and I do not know of any one else who has the slightest claim to it.

Of the whole three volumes it is still less necessary to say much. I have owed special thanks in succession to Mr. Doble, Mr. Milford, and Mr. Chapman (now Secretary) of the Clarendon Press; to Professors Firth and Case (indeed, but for the former's generous imparting of his treasures the whole thing could hardly have been done) for loan of books as well as answering of questions; and to not a few others, among whom I may specially mention my friend of many years, the Rev. William Hunt, D.Litt., Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. I wish the work had done greater credit to all this assistance and to the generous expenditure of the University and its Press. But such as it is I can say (speaking no doubt as a fool) that I should myself have been exceedingly grateful if somebody had done it fifty years ago: and that I shall be satisfied if only a few people are grateful for it between now and fifty or five hundred years hence. For there is stuff in it, though not mine, which will keep as long as the longest of these periods and longer.¹

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

1 Royal Crescent, Bath.
Oak-Apple Day, 1921.

¹ The tolerably gentle reader will easily understand that, in a book written, and even printed, at considerable intervals of time, Time itself will sometimes have affected statements. There may be a few such cases here. But it seems unnecessary to burden the thing with possible Corrigenda, as to the post-war price of the Cross-bath (p. 360), &c.