The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th
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Title: A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.)

Author: Mrs. Sutherland Orr

Release Date: December 28, 2004 [EBook #14498]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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A HANDBOOK TO THE WORKS OF ROBERT BROWNING

BY MRS. SUTHERLAND ORR

"No pause i' the leading and the light!"
_The Ring and the Book_, vol. ix. p. 226.

LONDON G. BELL AND SONS, LTD. 1927

_First Published May 1885._
_Second Edition, 1886._
_Third Edition, 1887._
_Fourth Edition, 1889._
_Fifth Edition, 1890._
_Sixth Edition, 1892._
_Reprinted 1895, 1899, 1902, 1907,
1910, 1913, 1919, 1923._

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY PURNELL AND SONS PAULTON, SOMERSET, ENGLAND

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

This book was written at the request of some of the members of the
Browning Society, and was originally intended to be a primer. It bears
the marks of this intention in its general scheme, and in the almost
abrupt brevity which the desired limits of space seemed to impose on its
earlier part. But I felt from the first that the spirit of Mr.
Browning's work could neither be compressed within the limits, nor
adapted to the uses, of a primer, as generally understood; and the book
has naturally shaped itself into a kind of descriptive Index, based
partly on the historical order and partly or the natural classification
of the various poems. No other plan suggested itself, at the time, for
bringing the whole series of these poems at once under the reader's eye:
since a description which throughout followed the historical order would
have involved both lengthiness and repetition; while, as I have tried to
show, there exists no scheme of natural classification into which the
whole series could have been forced. I realize, only now that it is too
late, that the arrangement is clumsy and confusing: or at least has
become so by the manner in which I have carried it out; and tha