[Footnote 6: The _Retrospective_ eulogist was deeply hurt by Cleveland's parodying this, and of course drags in Milton once more. 'Could one fancy Milton parodying _Lycidas_?' Now there is considerable difference between 'Mark Antony' and _Lycidas_: nor did Cleveland, so far as we know, dream of parodying his own poem on King. If Milton had had the humour to parody some of his own work, it would have been much the better for him and for us. No doubt Cleveland's actual parody is rather coarse and not extraordinarily witty: but there is no more objection to it in principle than to Thackeray's two forms of the 'Willow Song' in _Ottilia_.] [Footnote 7: Marked by straight bars.] [Footnote 8: Marked by dotted bars.] [Footnote 9: _History of English Prosody_ (London, 1906-10), vol. iii, app. iii.] [Footnote 10: _Very_ confusedly on the trisyllabic side or ear: for 'In th' [)e]ven[)i]ng' is a very awkward dactyl, and 'th' [)e]ven[=i]ng wh[=i]sp' not a much cleverer anapaest, while the same remark applies to 'fr[=a]gr[)a]nt f[)i]eld' and 'w[=i]th r[=o]s[)e]s' and their anapaestic counterparts.] [Footnote 11: The extraordinary complexity of the editions of Cleveland has been glanced at above. The following summary will at least give the reader some idea of the facts, and the two original Prefaces will extra-illustrate these facts with some views of causes. It need only be added here that the principle of the collection now given is, of course, to exclude everything that is certainly _not_ Cleveland's: and, in giving what certainly and probably is his, to arrange the items as far as possible in the order of their publication in the author's lifetime, though the impossibility of working with an actually complete collection of all the issues before one may have occasioned some error here. In the following abstract only the _Poems_ are referred to, as they alone concern us.