I Preface. INCLUDED the Poems of the FLETCHERS very early in my Fuller Worthies' Library; and within a few months of their private issue, the entire impressions were distributed among my fellow-students and lovers of our elder poetic literature. The number of copies (106 8vo, and 156 12mo) was so limited that I have had since to disappoint many applicants from far and near. It gives me accordingly no little pleasure to respond to the wish of the Publishers that I should furnish certain of the Fuller Worthies' Library to the general public. Giles will pave the way for Phineas Fletcher; and the Fletchers, with Sir John Davies and Sir Philip Sydney, which are to be almost contemporaneously published, afford access to a wider circle to some of those literary treasures that for the first time it has been my privilege to collect and edit critically and worthily. Throughout I have re-collated every line and word with the Author's own texts-not without advantage in various ways, in that my earlier Worthies were printed at a provincial press, and with un-instructed and merely mechanical workmen, so much so that even a second and third revise-proof failed to secure attention to my corrections. I add to this new edition of Giles Fletcher a bright little poem from the Tanner MSS., first printed by me as an appendix to his Father's Poems ("Licia," &c.) in the Fuller Worthies' Miscellanies. I have also been enabled to add to the facts and criticisms of the Memorial-Introduction. As a Maker of real and unique genius, Giles Fletcher is only in these later days winning his deserved renown. By his great poem he has never ceased to hold across the centuries the "fit audience tho' few;" and to-day he is a living motif and impulse in the line of "Sursum:" "Onward and upward, whatever the way; Onward and upward." ALEXANDER B. GROSART. FROM MY STUDY, St George's, Blackburn, Lancashire. 1 Hymns by F. T. Palgrave, 1870 (Macmillan), 3d ed. |