unpardonably topsy-turvy is to the true poetic sense a necessity and a virtue; even a solecism, if it appeals seriously to our whole imagination, stimulates it to a surprisingly high degree of enjoyment. In characterizing the individual poems we avoided the kind of formal classification which may more readily be made in the future when several authentic and typical examples of every kind have been collected. But we cannot conceal our own preference for those songs in which lyric, dramatic, and epic treatment is interwoven in such a way that a problem, at first shrouded in mystery, is finally solved skilfully, or even, if you will, epigrammatically. The well-known ballad, “Why dois your brand sae drop wi’ bluid, Edward, Edward?” is, especially in the original, the most perfect example of this species of poetry. We hope that the editors will be encouraged to publish in the near future another volume of poems from the rich store collected by them as well as from those already printed. We trust that when they do this they will guard themselves carefully against the sing-song of the Minnesingers, the blatant coarseness and the platitudes of the Mastersingers, as well as against everything monkish and pedantic. If they should collect a second volume of these German songs, they might also be asked to select songs of the same kind from foreign nations and to give them in the original and in translations that are either already extant or may be made by them for this special purpose. The most of these, to be sure, will be from the English, fewer from the French, some of a different type from the Spanish, and almost none from the Italian. If from the outset we have doubted the competence of criticism, even in its highest sense, to judge this work, we have all the more reason to ignore that kind of research which attempts to separate the songs that are genuine from those that have been more or less restored. The editors, so far as it is possible in these later times, have caught the spirit of their task, and we ought to be grateful to them even for those poems which have been oddly restored or made up of heterogeneous parts or are absolutely spurious. Who does not know what a song has to undergo when it has been for some time in the mouth of the people, and not merely uneducated people either? Why should he who finally writes it down and inserts it in a collection with other poems not have a certain personal right to it? We do not possess any poetic or sacred book of earlier times which has not depended for its final form on the skill or whim of him who first wrote it down or some later copyist.