atitude which all genuine and thankful
students will always be as ready to offer as all thankless and insolent
sciolists can ever be to disclaim, to the venerable scholar who since I
was first engaged on these notes has added yet another obligation to the
many under which he had already laid all younger and lesser labourers in
the same field of study, by the issue in a form fitly ennobled and
enriched of his great historical work on our early stage. It might seem
something of an unintended impertinence to add that such recognition of
his theory no more implies a blind acceptance of it--whatever such
acceptance on my part might be worth--than the expression of such
gratitude and respect could reasonably be supposed to imply an equally
blind confidence in the authority or the value of that version of
Shakespeare's text which has been the means of exposing a name so long
and so justly honoured, not merely to the natural and rational
inquisition of rival students, but to the rancorous and ribald obloquy of
thankless and frontless pretenders.

Here perhaps as well as anywhere else I may find a proper place to
intercalate the little word I have to say in partial redemption of my
pledge to take in due time some notice at more or less length, of the
only two among the plays doubtfully ascribed to Shakespeare which in my
eyes seem to bear any credible or conceivable traces of his touch. Of
these two I must give the lesser amount of space and attention to that
one which in itself is incomparably the more worthy of discussion,
admiration, and regard. The reason of this lies in the very excellence
which has attracted to it the notice of such competent judges and the
suffrage of such eminent names as would make the task of elaborate
commentary and analytic examination something more than superfluous on my
part; whereas the other has never been and will never be assigned to
Shakespeare by any critical student whose verdict is worth a minute's
consideration or the marketable value of a straw. Nevertheless it is on
other grounds worth notice; and such notice, to be itself of any value,
must of necessity be elaborate and minute. The critical analysis of
_King Edward III_. I have therefore relegated to its proper place in an
appendix; while I reserve a corner of my text, at once out of admiration
for the play itself and out of reverence for the names and authority of
some who have given their verdict in its behalf, for a rough and ra