who—­should mingle his own titles with those of the Poet, and give no indication to the reader as to which is which.  Dr. Grosart has been so devoted a student of Wordsworth, and we owe him so much, that one regrets to find in “The Prose Works of Wordsworth” (1876) the following title given to his letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, ’Apology for the French Revolution’.  It is interesting to know that Dr. Grosart thought this a useful description of the letter:  but a clear indication should have been given that it was not Wordsworth’s.  It is true that, in the general preface to his volumes, Dr. Grosart takes upon himself the responsibility for this title; but it should not have been printed as the title in chief, or as the headline to the text.  Similarly, with the titles of the second and third of the three ‘Essays on Epitaphs’.

As students of Wordsworth know, he issued a volume in 1838 containing all his sonnets then written; and, at the close of that edition, he added, “The six Sonnets annexed were composed as this Volume was going through the Press, but too late for insertion in the class of miscellaneous ones to which they belong.”  In 1884, Archbishop Trench edited the sonnets, with an admirable introductory “Essay on the History of the English Sonnet”; but, while Wordsworth gave no title to the 3rd and the 4th of the six, “composed as the Volume was going through the Press,”—­either in his edition of 1838, ‘or in any subsequent issue’ of his Poems—­his editor did so.  He gave what are really excellent titles, but he does not tell us that they are his own!  He calls them respectively ‘The Thrush at Twilight’, and ‘The Thrush at Dawn’.  Possibly Wordsworth would have approved of both of those titles:  but, that they are not his, should have been indicated.

I do not think it wise, from an editorial point of view, even to print in a “Chronological Table”—­as Professor Dowden has done, in his admirable Aldine edition—­titles which were not Wordsworth’s, without some indication to that effect.  But, in the case of Selections from Wordsworth—­such as those of Mr. Hawes Turner, and Mr. A. J. Symington,—­every one must feel that the editor should have informed his readers ‘when’ the title was Wordsworth’s, and ‘when’ it was his own coinage.  In the case of a much greater man—­and one of Wordsworth’s most illustrious successors in the great hierarchy of English poesy, Matthew Arnold—­it may be asked why should he have put ’Margaret, or the Ruined Cottage’, as the title of a poem written in 1795-7, when Wordsworth never once published it under that name?  It was an extract from the first book of ’The Excursion’—­written, it is true, in these early years,—­but only issued as part of the latter poem, first published in 1814.