Again, on behalf of readers of this National Library, I have to thank a poet of our day—in this case the Oxford Professor of Poetry—for joining his voice to the voices of the past through which our better life is quickened for the duties of to-day. Not for his own verse only, but for his fine sense also of what is truest in the poets who have gone before, the name of Francis Turner Palgrave is familiar to us all. Many a home has been made the richer for his gathering of voices of the past into a dainty “Golden Treasury of English Songs.” Of this work of his own I may cite what was said of it in Macmillan’s Magazine for October, 1882, by a writer of high authority in English Literature, Professor A. W. Ward, of Owens College. “A very eminent authority,” said Professor Ward, “has accorded to Mr. Palgrave’s historical insight, praise by the side of which all words of mine must be valueless,” Canon [now Bishop] Stubbs writes:—“I do not think that there is one of the Visions which does not carry my thorough consent and sympathy all through.”

Here, then, Mr. Palgrave re-issues, for the help of many thousands more, his own songs of the memories of the Nation, addressed to a Nation that has not yet forfeited the praise of Milton. Milton said of the Englishman, “If we look at his native towardliness in the roughcast, without breeding, some nation or other may haply be better composed to a natural civility and right judgment than he. But if he get the benefit once of a wise and well-rectified nurture, I suppose that wherever mention is made of countries, manners, or men, the English people, among the first that shall be praised, may deserve to be accounted a right pious, right honest, and right hardy nation.” So much is shown by the various utterances in this National Library. So much is shown, in the present volume of it, by a poet’s vision of the England that has been till now, and is what she has been.

H. M.

to the names of
HENRY HALLAM and FRANCIS PALGRAVE
friends and fellow-labourers in english history
for forty years,
who, differing often in judgment,
were at one throughout life in devoted love of
justice, truth, and england,
in affectionate and reverent remembrance
this book is inscribed and dedicated