To those who object to Notes being "thrust into view" (as it must be admitted that they are in this edition)--because it disturbs the pleasure of the reader who cares for the poetry of Wordsworth, and for the poetry alone--I may ask how many persons have read the Fenwick Notes, given together in a series, and mixed up heterogeneously with Wordsworth's own Notes to his poems, in comparison with those who have read and enjoyed them in the editions of 1857 and 1863? Professor Dowden justifies his plan of relegating the Fenwick and other notes to the end of each volume of his edition, on the ground that students of the Poet 'must' take the trouble of hunting to and fro for such things. I greatly doubt if many who have read and profited--for they could not but profit--by a perusal of Professor Dowden's work, 'have' taken that trouble, or that future readers of the Aldine edition will take it. To refer, somewhat more in detail, to the features of this edition. FIRST. As to the 'Chronological Order' of the Poems. The chief advantage of a chronological arrangement of the Works of any author--and especially of a poet who himself adopted a different plan--is that it shows us, as nothing else can do, the growth of his own mind, the progressive development of his genius and imaginative power. By such a redistribution of what he wrote we can trace the rise, the culmination, and also--it may be--the decline and fall of his genius. Wordsworth's own arrangement--first adopted in the edition of 1815--was designed by him, with the view of bringing together, in separate classes, those Poems which referred to the same (or similar) subjects, or which were supposed to be the product of the same (or a similar) faculty, irrespective of the date of composition. Thus one group was entitled "Poems of the Fancy," another "Poems of the Imagination," a third "Poems proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection," a fourth "Epitaphs and Elegiac Pieces," again "Poems on the Naming of Places," "Memorials of Tours," "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," "Miscellaneous Sonnets," etc. The principle which guided him in this was obvious enough. It was, in some respects, a most natural arrangement; and, in now adopting a chronological order, the groups, which he constructed with so much care, are broken up. Probably every author would attach more importance to a classification of his Works, which brought them together under appropriate headings, irrespective of date, than to a method of arrangement which exhibited the growth of his own mind; and it may be taken for granted that posterity would not think highly of any author who attached special value to this latter element. None the less posterity may wish to trace the gradual development of genius, in the imaginative writers of the past, by the help of such a subsequent rearrangement of their Works.