fragments by Miss Wordsworth may find a place in this edition. I do not attach much importance, however, to the recovery of these unpublished poems. The truth is, as Sir Henry Taylor--himself a poet and critic of no mean order--remarked [17], "In these days, when a great man's path to posterity is likely to be more and more crowded, there is a tendency to create an obstruction, in the desire to give an impulse. To gather about a man's work all the details that can be found out about it is, in my opinion, to put a drag upon it; and, as of the Works, so of the Life." The industrious labour of some editors in disinterring the trivial works of great men is not a commendable industry. All great writers have occasionally written trifles--this is true even of Shakespeare--and if they wished them to perish, why should we seek to resuscitate them? Besides, this labour--whether due to the industry of admiring friends, or to the ambition of the literary resurrectionist--is futile; because the verdict of Time is sure, and posterity is certain to consign the recovered trivialities to kindly oblivion. The question which should invariably present itself to the editor of the fragments of a great writer is, "_Can these bones live_?" If they cannot, they had better never see the light. Indeed the only good reason for reprinting the fragments which have been lost (because the author himself attached no value to them), is that, in a complete collection of the works of a great man, some of them may have a biographic or psychological value. But have we any right to reproduce, from an antiquarian motive, what--in a literary sense--is either trivial, or feeble, or sterile? We must, however, distinguish between what is suitable for an edition meant either to popularise an author, or to interpret him, and an edition intended to bring together all that is worthy of preservation for posterity. There is great truth in what Mr. Arnold has lately said of Byron: "I question whether by reading everything which he gives us, we are so likely to acquire an admiring sense, even of his variety and abundance, as by reading what he gives us at his happier moments. Receive him absolutely without omission and compromise, follow his whole outpouring, stanza by stanza, and line by line, from the very commencement to the very end, and he is capable of being tiresome." [18] This is quite true; nevertheless, English literature demands a complete edition of all the works of Byron: and it may be safely predicted that, for weightier reasons and with greater urgency, it will continue to call for the collected works of Wordsworth. It should also be noted that the fact of Wordsworth's having dictated to Miss Fenwick (so late as 1843) a stanza from 'The Convict' in his note to 'The Lament of Mary Queen of Scots' (1817), justifies the inclusion of the whole of that (suppressed) poem in such an edition as this.