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PREFACE.

THE text of The Princess is here printed from that of the latest (1884) English edition, with the correction of a few obvious errors (see on i. 121, ii. 332, vi. 161, etc.). As a rule, I have followed the poet's orthog. raphy (except in words like color, honor, etc.), and his restricted use of the apostrophe in past tenses, - which I do not like, though it is adopted by several of the recent editors of Shakespeare.

In the Notes all the "various readings" have been given, so far as I could ascertain them. For the first edition I have had to depend on the American reprint, which appears to have been carefully made. Both this and the second London edition have been minutely collated with American reprints of the fourth and fifth editions. The third edition (1850), in which the intercalary Songs first appeared, I have not been able to get hold of; but the copy of the second edition that I have used has these songs inserted in manuscript, which I have assumed to be trustworthy. I shall have the opportunity of verifying its readings at some future day (in England, if not in this country), and any errors I may discover will be corrected in another edition.

A few specimens of the alterations made by the author in the successive editions of The Princess have been given by Mr. Shepherd in Tennysoniana, by Mr. Wace in his Life and Works of Tennyson, by Mr. Dawson in his Study of The Princess, by Mr. Warren in his paper on "The Bibliography of Tennyson" in the Fortnightly Review, and by sundry other writers in reviews and magazines; but, so far as I can learn, this attempt of mine to prepare a complete "variorum" edition of the poem is the first that has been made.

Much of the work on the Notes was done full twenty-five years ago, when I read The Princess with a class of girls in school. The few obscuri ties that baffled us all then were pretty well cleared up in going through the poem with another class a few years later. In putting my old memoranda in shape, however, I have found Mr. Dawson's Study of much service. I have been indebted to him for certain facts and citations that I had not met with elsewhere; and sometimes I have quoted a note of his instead of taking the trouble to work up a new one com my own material.

Tennyson, like Scott, makes free use of Elizabethan words and phrases, and the "parallelisms" I have cited from Shakespeare and his contemporaries might easily have been multiplied sevenfold.

If any reader detects errors or omissions in the collation of the "various readings," or in any other part of my work, I shall be very grateful for a memorandum of them.

CAMBRIDGE, June 22, 1884.

NOTE TO THIRD EDITION.

SINCE the first edition was published, I have had the privilege of examining an interleaved copy of the first edition of The Princess belonging to Dr. F. J. Furnival of London, in which he has recorded the new readings of the 3d and 5th editions. This has enabled me to settle certain doubtful points and to supply several omissions in my collation of those editions; and also to detect sundry misprints in the 1st American edition (see notes on prol. 69, ii. 19, iv. 401, v. 215, and vi. 340) and a few errors in the manuscript copy of the songs mentioned above.

I have also received a very kind letter from Lord Tennyson, calling attention to one or two slips in notes quoted from Mr. Dawson. He also criticises the cut on page 36 (taken from the holiday edition of the poem) as not conforming to the description in iv. 185-188. The gate seems to have been under the "arch" of i. 206 fol., though not mentioned there.

Feb. 14, 1890.

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