It is a sweet and comforting thought for every poet that, whether or not the public cares during his life to read his verses, it will after his death care very much to read his letters to his mistress, to his wife, to his relatives, to his friends, to his butcher, and to his baker. And some letters are by that same public held to be more precious than others. If, for instance, it has chanced that during the poet’s life he, like Rossetti, had to borrow thirty shillings from a friend, that is a circumstance of especial piquancy. The public likes—or rather it demands—to know all about that borrowed cash. Hence it behoves the properly equipped editor who understands his duty to see that not one allusion to it in the poet’s correspondence is omitted. If he can also show what caused the poet to borrow those thirty shillings—if he can by learned annotations show whether the friend in question lent the sum willingly or unwillingly, conveniently or inconveniently—if he can show whether the loan was ever repaid, and if repaid when—he will be a happy editor indeed. Then he will find a large and a grateful public to whom the mood in which the poet sat down to write ‘The Blessed Damosel’ is of far less interest than the mood in which he borrowed thirty shillings. We do not charge the editor of this volume {104} with exhibiting unusual want of taste. On the whole, he is less irritating to the poetical student than those who have laboured in kindred “fields of literature.” Indeed, we do not so much blame the editors of such books as we blame the public, whose coarse and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum. The writer of this review possesses an old circulating-library copy of a book containing some letters of Coleridge. One page, and one only, is greatly disfigured by thumb marks. It is the page on which appears, not some precious hint as to the conclusion of ‘Christabel,’ but a domestic missive of Coleridge’s ordering broad beans for dinner. If, then, the name of those readers who take an interest in broad beans is legion compared with the name of those who take an interest in ‘Kubla Khan,’ is not the wise editor he who gives all due attention to the poet’s favourite vegetable? Those who will read with avidity Rossetti’s allusion to his wife’s confinement in the letter in which he tells Allingham that “the child had been dead for two or three weeks” will laugh to scorn the above remarks, and as they are in the majority the laugh is with them.