[Footnote 3: I think this will justify the critic (whoever he was) whose sentence--'quaint mediocrity and inappropriate metre'--offended Hannah's editorial chivalry as 'very unjust'. Indeed, I should make it stronger and say 'irritating inadequacy alike in metre and phrase'.] [Footnote 4: Especially that of Percy Lodge in the eighteenth century, when it was the Dowager Duchess of Somerset's: see Shenstone, Lady Luxborough, and Southey's _Doctor_, chaps. 107 and 108. Between the times it had belonged to Bathurst, and was then also a home of men of letters.] [Footnote 5: With the complementary and not unusual libel that he died a Romanist.] [Footnote 6: Between the two dates there had been a fresh _issue_ in 1664, with four new elegies. But it has been doubted whether even this was a new _edition_.] [Footnote 7: The text of the following poems will be found, as far as Hannah's edition goes, to differ not greatly from his; but it has been collated with the originals in print and MS. by myself and, more carefully still, by Mr. Percy Simpson. The remaining poems (including the fourth or 'King Charles' Elegy added in 1664, which Hannah did not give) are adapted in the same way from direct photographic copies of the originals--collated where necessary. The variants of _Sic Vita_ which the Archdeacon collected are of such interest and so characteristic of seventeenth-century poetry that it seemed desirable to reproduce them.