[1] ‘Memoirs,’ vol. ii. p. 466.

[2] Ibid. vol. i. p. 420.

It is probable that the amount of the Prose of Wordsworth will come as a surprise—­surely a pleasant one—­on even his admirers and students.  His own use of ‘Tract’ to describe a goodly octavo volume, and his calling his ‘Guide’ a ‘little volume’ while it is a somewhat considerable one, together with the hiding away of some of his most matterful and weightiest productions in local and fugitive publications, and in Prefaces and Appendices to Poems, go far to explain the prevailing unacquaintance with even the extent, not to speak of the importance, of his Prose, and the light contentment with which it has been permitted so long to remain (comparatively) out of sight.  That the inter-relation of the Poems to the Prose, and of the Prose to the Poems—­of which above he himself wrote—­makes the collection and publication of the Prose a duty to all who regard William Wordsworth as one of the supreme intellects of the century—­as certainly the glory of the Georgian and Victorian age as ever Shakespeare and Raleigh were of the Elizabethan and Jacobean—­will not be questioned to-day.

The present Editor can only express his satisfaction at being called to execute a task which, from a variety of circumstances, has been too long delayed; but only delayed, inasmuch as the members of the Poet’s family have always held it as a sacred obligation laid upon them, with the additional sanction that Wordsworth’s old and valued friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, Esq., had expressed a wish in his last Will (1868) that the Prose Works of his friend should one day be collected; and which wish alone, from one so discriminating and generous—­were there no other grounds for doing so—­the family of Wordsworth could not but regard as imperative.  He rejoices that the delay—­otherwise to be regretted—­has enabled the Editor to furnish a much fuller and more complete collection than earlier had perhaps been possible.  He would now briefly notice the successive portions of these Volumes: 

VOL.  I.

I. Political.

(a) Apology for the French Revolution, 1793.

This is from the Author’s own Ms., and is published for the first time.  Every reader of ‘The Recluse’ and ‘The Excursion’ and the ’Lines on the French Revolution, as it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’—­to specify only these—­is aware that, in common with Southey and the greater Coleridge, Wordsworth was in sympathy with the uprising of France against its tyrants.  But it is only now that we are admitted to a full discovery of his youthful convictions and emotion by the publication of this Manuscript, carefully preserved by him, but never given to the world.  The title on the fly-leaf—­’Apology,’ &c., being ours—­in the Author’s own handwriting, is as follows: