IN MEMORIAM, THE PRINCESS, AND MAUD BY ALFRED LORD TENNYSON EDITED WITH CRITICAL INTRODUCTIONS, COMMENTARIES BY JOHN CHURTON COLLINS METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON 66 PREFACE THE pioneer of a critical edition of Tennyson's poems is little to be envied. Never since Milton has a poet been so fastidiously scrupulous about the minutiae of expression and language, about the exact forms of inflexion, about spelling, about the collocation of vowels and consonants, about the use of small or capital letters, about the use of italics, about punctuation. It is well known that Milton ordered the substitution of "hundreds" for "hunderds" in Paradise Lost, i. 760, and the substitution of "we" for wee in book ii. 414 of the same poem, to be noted specially as errata, and that he studied with the nicest care the forms of "thir" and "their," insisting importunately on the printers observing the distinction. But the work of an editor of Milton, even if he be as conscientious in his drudgery as the poet in the nobler activity of composition, is a comparatively easy one; for of the Minor Poems there are only two authentic editions, of Paradise Lost two also, of Paradise Regained and of Samson Agonistes one. The editions of Tennyson's various works are so numerous that no Bibliography records them, and no single library, public or private, so far at least as I can discover, contains them. These editions teem with variants, and so restlessly, one might almost say morbidly, indefatigable was Tennyson in correction, that till an edition, even though there be no indication on the title page that it is anything more |