INTRODUCTORY NOTE DR. F. I. CARPENTER, the Editor of the present volume, is a distinguished Lecturer on English literature at the University of Chicago. He is known to American readers, and to students of English literature in general, by a very subtle and comprehensive investigation of the poetic speech of the Elizabethans-Metaphor and Simile in the Minor Elizabethan Drama. After all the labours of Mr. Bullen and others, the rich lyric literature of the Elizabethan age, and of the ages which went before and after, still remains relatively little known. It is hoped that the present survey of it, by a scholar who has made it his special study, will help to make its countless beauties more generally familiar, and an appreciation of the "mind and art" of our elder song-writers more readily attainable. C. H. HERFORD |