pressure of the printers for copy in any form; but possibly it had another cause. De Quincey's Reminiscences of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, on their first appearance in _Tait's Magazine_ between 1834 and 1840, had provoked a good deal of resentment among those concerned. Coleridge was then dead; but Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth were still living; as was also Southey. Little wonder that the surviving relatives of Coleridge felt aggrieved by the extreme frankness of some of De Quincey's personal recollections of the dead sage, or that the Wordsworth and Southey families were annoyed and offended on similar grounds. Wordsworth, with his massive serenity, seems, indeed, to have tossed the matter aside easily enough; but not so Southey. Carlyle tells us that, when he first met Southey in London, Southey was full of the subject of De Quincey's delinquencies in publishing so many anecdotes of a confidential kind respecting Wordsworth, Coleridge, and himself, and spoke on the subject in terms which Carlyle, who had read the articles, thought needlessly angry and vehement. Something of all this may have been in De Quincey's mind when, in reproducing his Lake Reminiscences in 1853 for his Collective Edition, he came to the two _Tait_ articles in which Southey had principally figured. Hence, perhaps, though Southey had died in 1843, De Quincey's large excisions from those articles, and his consolidation of them into one paper, pleasant enough in the main, but comparatively insipid. It was an editorial mistake on De Quincey's part, and must not bind us now. The articles in their original livelier and more extensive magazine form being irrevocable at any rate, and forming part and parcel of the American Collective Edition, we have acted accordingly. We revert in the present edition to the text of _Tait's Magazine_ for the particular articles in question, and print them as they stood there, with their separate titles. * * * * *