words, "Joseph Cottle, Bristol." The sale was so slow that Cottle parted with the larger number of the five hundred copies printed to Arch, a London bookseller.

The

copyright was purchased in a lot with other copyrights by Longman, but as it was considered of no value, Cottle begged that it might be restored to him. His request was granted, whereupon Cottle presented the copyright to Wordsworth.

Lyrical Ballads cannot be said to have lived unnoticed even in its earlier years of existence. In 1800 appeared a second edition (two volumes, the first being in the main a reprint of Lyrical Ballads, 1798), and other editions followed in 1802 and 1805.

The origin of the book is told by Wordsworth in the note on "We are Seven"

which he dictated as an old man to Miss

Fenwick. Coleridge and he agreed to defray the expenses of a tour from Nether Stowey to Lynton by writing a poem to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine. In the course of their walk the " Ancient Mariner " was planned. "We returned by Dulverton to Alfoxden. The Ancient Mariner' grew and grew, till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to the expectation of five pounds, and we began to talk of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on natural subjects taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium. Accordingly I wrote "The Idiot Boy,' 'Her eyes are wild,' &c., 'We are Seven,' 'The Thorn,' and some others."

Wordsworth's recollection of what Cole

ridge had written in his Biographia Literaria was not exact. Two classes of poems, according to Coleridge, were to be included in the volume of Lyrical Ballads: "in the one the incidents and agents were to be in part at least supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. . . . For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life." These last were to be, as we now say, naturalistic or realistic, but they were to be illuminated by the light of imagination and the significance of the incidents narrated was to be interpreted by a meditative and feeling mind.

Coleridge, as I have tried to show elsewhere (Fortnightly Review, 1889: "Coleridge

as a Poet"), indicates precisely wherein lay the importance of the publication of this little volume in the history of our literature. There existed two powerful tendencies in the literature of the time, each of which was liable to excess when it operated alone, each of which needed to work in harmony with the other, and to take into itself something from the other-the tendency to realism, seen in such a poem as Crabbe's The Village, and the tendency towards romance, seen in its more extravagant forms in such writings as those of Matthew Gregory Lewis. Realism might easily have become hard, dry, literal, as we sometimes see it in Crabbe. Romance might easily have degenerated into a coarse revel in material horrors. English poetry needed, first, that romance should be saved and ennobled by the pre

sence and the power of truth-truth moral and psychological; and secondly, that naturalism, without losing any of its fidelity to fact, should be saved and ennobled by the presence and the power of imagination— "the light that never was, on sea or land." This precisely was what Coleridge and Wordsworth contributed to English poetry in their joint volume of Lyrical Ballads, which in consequence may justly be described as marking an epoch in the history of our literature.

The germ of Wordsworth's celebrated Preface to Lyrical Ballads, which sets forth his theory of poetic diction, will be found in the "Advertisement" of the present volume. The Preface appeared first in the edition of 1800; it was considerably enlarged in the edition of 1802. It is worth while perhaps