COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1902. Reprinted orves 015 PREFACE It is hoped that this volume will find a place as a reading-book in connection with the study of English history. Poets are spirited historians; they enlist imagination and sympathy in the cause of the fading past. They turn the task of memory to pastime. They are not always accurate, but neither are more sedate chroniclers. The dulness of a record was never yet proof of its veracity. The London populace of Elizabethan times learned English history from the stage. The reigns of the Plantagenets, the Wars of the Roses, and the reigns of the Tudors were set forth in a long series of chronicle plays and historical dramas. In these, as in the lyrics and ballads that more commonly express the Stuart reigns, the tendency is to concentrate attention on royal and noble personages rather than on the life of the nation as a whole. It is a stately and a tragic story as the poets tell it, too stately and too tragic to give an altogether just impression of the growth of a great people; but it furnishes the dramatic outline to which a fuller knowledge may easily relate itself. The present book illustrates, by carefully chosen selections from English poetry, the history of England from Queen Boadicea to Queen Victoria. Notes introductory to the selections carry on a connected account of principal events and make manifest the historic bearing of each poem. Further notes, at the end of the book, explain allusions and difficulties in the text, and also set the poets right in flagrant cases of misreporting. As one of the editors has derived her ideas of English history chiefly from English literature, and the other has suffered the modern, scientific training on "sources," this volume represents a battle-field, where values of fact and values of poetry have both been stoutly championed. The honors of war are divided. While, on the one hand, the historian fears that the book will lead young readers to believe that the Jacobites were the most important characters in English history, the literary editor, on the other, has submitted to the insertion of a few selections whose only art is to tell the truth. The space limit has necessitated the omission of a number of famous poems, as Gray's "The Bard,” |