Original (English)

Prefatory Note When the fourth volume of this series was published three years ago, many of the critics who had up till then, as Horace Walpole said of God, been the dearest creatures in the world to me, took another turn. Not only did they very properly disapprove my choice of poems: they went on to write as if the Editor of Georgian Poetry were a kind of public functionary, like the President of the Royal Academy; and they asked — again, on this assumption, very properly — who was E.