ain-glorious pleasure. The Anglo-Saxon alone has in our day exterminated,
root and branch, whole tribes of mankind. He alone has depopulated
continents, species after species, of their wonderful animal life, and is
still yearly destroying; and this not merely to occupy the land, for it
lies in large part empty, but for his insatiable lust of violent
adventure, to make record bags and kill. That things are so is ample
reason for the hardest words the Author can command.

To his fellow poets and poetic critics the Author too would say a word. He
has chosen as the vehicle of his thought a metre to which in English they
are unaccustomed, the six-foot Alexandrine couplet. For some reason which
the Author has never understood, this, the classic metre in France, has
stood in disrepute with us. Yet he ventures to think that, for rhetorical
and dramatic purposes, it is infinitely preferable to our own heroic
couplet, and preferable even, in any hands but the strongest, to our
traditional blank verse. He believes, moreover, that if our skilled
dramatists would make trial of it, it would, by its extreme flexibility
and the natural break of its cesura, enable them to capture that shyest of
all shy things--success in a rhymed modern play. At least, he trusts that
they will give it their consideration, and not condemn him off-hand
because, having a rhetorical subject to deal with, he has treated it
rhetorically and in what he considers the best rhetoric form, though both
rhetoric and Alexandrines are out of fashion.

Lastly, he has to discharge, in connection with his poem, a double debt of
gratitude. The poem, unworthy as it is, is, by permission, dedicated to
the first of living thinkers, Mr. Herbert Spencer. To his reasoned and
life-long advocacy of the rights of the weak in Man's higher evolution is
due all that in the poem is intellectually worthiest, to this and to the
inspiration of much personal encouragement and sympathy received by the
Author at a moment of public excitement when it was onerous yet necessary
for the Author to speak unpopular truths.

To Mr. Spencer's great name the Author would add the name of that other
senior of the ideal world, Mr. George Frederick Watts, the first of living
painters, with whom, while the poem was in progress, it was his privilege
to spend many emotional hours in high communings on Life and Death and
the tragic Beauty of the world. He would thank him publicly here for the
leave generous