Produced by Jonathan Ingram, David Cortesi, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: This file contains Unicode (UTF-8) characters to represent accented characters that are not in the basic Latin-1 set. There are also phrases and sentences in Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew which are shown as Unicode characters followed by an English transliteration, for example: лорда Байрона [Cyrillic: lorda Bairona]. All these characters should display properly using a Type-1 or TrueType font distributed by a major software vendor. If some characters display as blanks or empty boxes, try using a standard serif font such as Times or Palatino. The original work used occasional superscript characters, which are shown here using a carat, for example L^n (abbreviation of London), Esq^re^ or Hon^ble^. In the section entitled NOTES, the original work showed how lines of text were hand-edited, including words or phrases that were deleted by striking a line through them. These are shown thus: (-stricken text-). The Works OF LORD BYRON A NEW, REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. Poetry. Vol. VII. EDITED BY ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE, M.A., HON. F.R.S.L. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 1904. PREFACE TO THE SEVENTH VOLUME. Of the seventy-three "Epigrams and Jeux d'Esprit," which are printed at the commencement of this volume, forty-five were included in Murray's one-volume edition of 1837, eighteen have been collected from various publications, and ten are printed and published for the first time. The "Devil's Drive," which appears in Moore's _Letters and Journals_, and in the sixth volume of the Collected Edition of 1831 as an "Unfinished Fragment" of ninety-seven lines, is now printed and published for the first time in its entirety (248 lines), from a MS. in the possession of the Earl of Ilchester. "A Farewell Petition to J.C.H. Esq.;" "My Boy Hobbie O;" "[Love and Death];" and "Last Words on Greece," are reprinted from the first volume of _Murray's Magazine_ (1887). A few imperfect and worthless poems remain in MS.; but with these and one or two other unimportant exceptions, the present edition of the Poetical Works may be regarded as complete.