trouble to
put copies of the original editions into the hands of the printers, to
bid them "follow copy," and to content myself with seeing that the
reprint was faithful. The result would have been, to a very small number
of professed students of English literature, an interesting example of
the changes which printers' spelling underwent in the last forty years
of the seventeenth century. But it would have been a nuisance and a
stumbling-block to the ordinary reader, in whose way it is certainly not
the business of the editor of a great English classic to throw stones of
offence. Where a writer has written in a distinctly archaic form of
language, as in the case of all English writers before the Renaissance,
adherence to the original orthography is necessary and right. Even in
the so-called Elizabethan age, where a certain archaism of phrase
survives, the appreciation of temporal and local colour may be helped by
such an adherence. But Dryden is in every sense a modern. His list of
obsolete words is insignificant, of archaic phrases more insignificant
still, of obsolete constructions almost a blank. If any journalist or
reviewer were to write his to-morrow's leader or his next week's article
in a style absolutely modelled on Dryden, no one would notice anything
strange in it, except perhaps that the English was a good deal better
than usual There can therefore be no possible reason for erecting an
artificial barrier between him and his readers of to-day, especially as
that barrier would be not only artificial but entirely arbitrary. I
shall however return to this point in some prefatory remarks to the
dramas.

Another problem which presented itself was the question of retaining the
irregular stichometric division in some plays and passages which are not
in verse. Scott has in such case generally printed them in prose, and
with some hesitation I have, though not uniformly, followed him.

I have already received much help from divers persons, and I trust,
_dis faventibus_, to acknowledge this and more at the end of my
journey, in (to use a word for which a great writer of French fought
hard) a "postface." In a work of magnitude such as the present, which
can only be proceeded with _pedetentim_, the proverb about the
relations of beginner and finisher is peculiarly applicable. For the
present I shall confine myself to mentioning with the utmost
thankfulness the kindness of Mr. E.W. Gosse, who has placed at my
disposal a