To the first edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ is prefixed four pages of ‘Advertisement,’ or preface. About it two or three points are noticeable. First, it gives no hint that two poets have been engaged upon the volume: ‘the author,’ who speaks of himself in the third person, is responsible alike for the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and for ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill.’ Secondly, it is written in that familiar language--just our daily speech a little chastened and braced--which Wordsworth employed at the beginning, and employed to the end. Again, it utters, thus early in Wordsworth’s life, that note of warning as to mistaken notions of what Poetry demands, which the writer repeated afterwards with infinite elaboration. ‘It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind’--that is, by implication, his first apology for the choice of humble theme. ‘Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed: it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste.’ Expressions may seem too familiar--may seem lacking in dignity. But, ‘it is apprehended that the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been most successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make.’ Here is the apology for the fashion of presentation--the germ of that which was afterwards so fully developed in famous writings which borrowed here and there a neat and significant phrase from this first ‘Advertisement.’ The title of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ begins the table of contents, and the poem runs on to the fifty-first page of the volume--nearly a quarter of all that the volume holds. But Coleridge’s remaining contributions were small and few, consisting of ‘The Nightingale,’ and of but one other. That he made even these contributions has sometimes escaped people’s notice. He had intended to do more, for he tells us in the _Biographia Literaria_ that, having written the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ he was preparing, among other poems, ‘The Dark Ladie’ and the ‘Christabel.’ ‘But Mr. Wordsworth’s industry has proved much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter.’ When the ‘Ancient Mariner’ came to be reprinted--under Coleridge’s banner alone--some minor changes were made. Some of them were gains, but some were losses. And there was added then, what the _Lyrical Ballads_ does not contain, the ‘Gloss’--that wonderful telling of the story and yet departing from it--which is set forth in grave and inspired prose. ‘It was an afterthought,’ Wordsworth tells us, in speaking of his friend’s poem.