While this little volume was being transcribed for the press (a considerable part of it having been written three years ago) an article appeared in the Fortnightly Review,* entitled The Bibliography of Tennyson. The plan of that article and of this work are essentially different: the former is not only very meagre but full of inaccuracies, so that I found my labours by no means superseded or anticipated. That the writer's study of his subject has been quite superficial I shall prove by three or four instances, taken at random out of thirty or forty which I have marked with my pen. 1. (p. 393.) "After an interval of two years the "volume of 1833 appeared. The poet was then "twenty-one or twenty-two." a. In the winter of 1832, when the volume in question was published, Tennyson, who was born in 1809, was at least twenty-three. b. The writer seriously argues (see his note) that two editions of this volume exist because it has the date of 1833 while a note at the end of the current editions states it to have been published "in the winter of 1832." Every one knows it is a common practice of publishers to put * No. X. October 1, 1865. the date of the new when a book is published late in the old year. 2. (p. 401.) The Princess. "The greater part "of the new lines are occasioned by the weaving "into the plot of the piece the after-thought of "the Prince's cataleptic seizures, of which there "is no mention till the second or perhaps the third "edition." 3. (p. 402.) In Memoriam. "There are not "above five or six alterations in the whole volume "since its first appearance." There are at least twenty, as I have shown in Chapter iv. 4. (lbid.) "Maud and other Poems, 1855, was (sic) remodelled somewhat in the new edition of The poem of Maud was remodelled in the 1859." edition of 1856. 5. (Ibid.) The Sonnet to Macready is misquoted and the date of it wrong. R. H. S. |