valuable assistance. I beg them to accept the expression of my heartfelt
gratitude.

No attempt has been made to say everything and be complete. Many notes
will however allow the curious to go themselves to the sources, to
verify, to see with their own eyes, and, if they find cause (_absit
omen!_), to disagree. In those notes most of the space has been filled
by references to originals; little has been left for works containing
criticisms and appreciations: the want of room is the only reason, not
the want of reverence and sympathy for predecessors.

To be easily understood one must be clear, and, to be clear,
qualifications and attenuations must be reduced to a minimum. The reader
will surely understand that many more "perhapses" and "abouts" were in
the mind of the author than will be found in print; he will make, in his
benevolence, due allowance for the roughness of that instrument, speech,
applied to events, ideas, theories, things of beauty, as difficult to
measure with rule as "the myst on Malverne hulles." He will know that
when Saxons are described as having a sad, solemn genius, and not
numbering among their pre-eminent qualities the gift of repartee, it
does not mean that for six centuries they all of them sat and wept
without intermission, and that when asked a question they never knew
what to answer. All men are men, and have human qualities more or less
developed in their minds; nothing more is implied in those passages but
that one quality was _more_ developed in one particular race of men and
that in another.

When a book is just finished, there is always for the author a most
doleful hour, when, retracing his steps, he thinks of what he has
attempted, the difficulties of the task, the unlikeliness that he has
overcome them. Misprints taking wrong numbers by the hand, black and
thorny creatures, dance their wild dance round him. He is awe-stricken,
and shudders; he wonders at the boldness of his undertaking;
"Qu'allait-il faire dans cette galere?" The immensity of the task, the
insufficience of the means stand in striking contrast. He had started
singing on his journey; now he looks for excuses to justify his having
ever begun it. Usually, it must be confessed, he finds some, prints them
or not, and recovers his spirits. I have published other works; I think
I did not print the excuses I found to explain the whys and the
wherefores; they were the same in all cases: roadway stragglers, Piers
Plowman,