The Editor’s note, after p. viii., signed “Augustine Birrell,” says:  “All that has been done is to prefix (within square brackets) to some of the plays and poems a few lines explanatory of the characters and events depicted and described, and to explain in the margin of the volumes the meaning of such words as might, if left unexplained, momentarily arrest the understanding of the reader ...  Mr. F.G.  Kenyon has been kind enough to make the notes for ‘The Ring and the Book,’ but for the rest the editor alone is responsible.”  The text is that of the edition of 1889, 1894, but the arrangement is more strictly chronological.  The notes are throughout unnecessary and to be regretted.

II.

REPRINT OF DISCARDED PREFACES TO THE FIRST EDITIONS OF SOME OF BROWNING’S WORKS

1.  Preface to Paracelsus (1835).

“I am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset,—­mistaking my performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in common,—­judge it by principles on which it has never been moulded, and subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform.  I therefore anticipate his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers, whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons or events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded; and this for a reason.  I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama:  the canons of the drama are well known, and I cannot but think that, inasmuch as they have immediate regard to stage representation, the peculiar advantages they hold out are really such, only so long as the purpose for which they were at first instituted is kept in view.  I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem, wherein all those restrictions only submitted to on account of compensating good in the original scheme are scrupulously retained, as though for some special fitness in themselves,—­and all new facilities placed at an author’s disposal by the vehicle he selects, as pertinaciously rejected.  It is certain, however, that a work like mine depends more immediately on the intelligence and sympathy of the reader for its success;—­indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which, supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights into one constellation—­a Lyre or a Crown.  I trust for his indulgence towards a poem which had not been imagined six months ago, and that even should he think slightingly of the present (an experiment I am in no case likely to repeat) he will not be prejudiced against other productions which may follow in a more popular, and perhaps less difficult form.