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EDITOR'S PREFACE

THE present Edition of Byron's prose is divided into (1) Letters; (2) Journals and Memoranda; and (3) Miscellanies as the epistle to Roberts, the Vampire fragment, the Observations upon Observations,' and the like. The Text is reprinted from Moore, from Dallas, Leigh Hunt, J. T. Hodgson, and the rest, and, incomplete as probably it is, it is practically the first reissue on novel and peculiar lines which has been attempted for close on seventy years.

For the Notes.-There is a sense in which Byron is grossly over-annotated. There is also a sense

in which his work cries out for annotation. In preparing my commentary, I have drawn when I could on Moore and the others; so that a certain proportion of it also is not new. But when the Life and Letters was published in 1830-31, many allusions were plain which are now obscure, or worse; so that there was a very great deal to be

done-as not a little still remains to do-in the way of elucidation pure and simple. More: the years whose voice-in-chief was Byron, have always seemed to me among the most personal (so to speak), as they are certainly the worst understood, in the national existence. They were years of storm and triumph on all the lines of human destiny; and they gave to history a generation at once dandified and truculent, bigoted yet dissolute, magnificent but vulgar (or so it seems to us), artistic, very sumptuous, and yet capable of astonishing effort and superb self-sacrifice. It was a generation bent above all upon living its life to the utmost of its capacity; and, though there are still those living who can remember when its masterpoet-(for that, I take it, the singer of Lara and Juan was) was gathered to his fathers, so great a change has come upon his England in the interval between the obsequies at Hucknall Torkard and the writing of this Preface, that it is practically not less remote from ours than the England of Spenser and Raleigh. Rightly or wrongly, then, I have written on the theory that to know something of Byron, one should know something of the aims and lives and personalities of contemporary men and women, with something of the social and political conditions which

made him and his triumph possible. I cannot believe that this first instalment, for all its bulk, will go far towards the accomplishment of such an end. But I confess to cherishing a hope that, by the time I have finished my task, I shall be found to have formed a collection of facts and portraitures, which, by making for a juster apprehension of the quality and temper of Byron's environment, will make for a more intimate understanding of Byron's character and Byron's achievement. Both these are extraordinary; neither can be explained, or shouted, or sniffed away; and it is merely futile to attempt an estimate of either till one can do so with some knowledge of relevant and significant circumstances, and with a certain sympathy (or the reverse, if it must be so) with the influences under which the character was developed and the achievement done.

It will be found, I think, that in the course of my work I have made acknowledgments wherever they were due. In this place I have pleasure in tendering peculiar thanks to Mr. Alfred Morrison for permission to copy certain pieces in his unrivalled Collection of Autographs, and to Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, as to Mr. Daniel Conner, for the communication of results, of lasting moment to this

contribution to the literature which has accumulated, and must go on accumulating, round the sole English poet-(for Sir Walter conquered in prose)-bred since Milton to live a master-influence in the world at large.

23rd November 1896.

W. E. H.

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