s considerable
number of additions and corrections. I found, indeed, few errors of a kind
that need have seemed serious except to Momus or Zoilus. But in the
enormous number of statements of fact which literary history of the more
exact kind requires, minor blunders, be they more or fewer, are sure to
creep in. No writer, again, who endeavours constantly to keep up and extend
his knowledge of such a subject as Elizabethan literature, can fail to have
something new to say from time to time. And though no one who is competent
originally for his task ought to experience any violent changes of view,
any one's views may undergo modification. In particular, he may find that
readers have misunderstood him, and that alterations of expression are
desirable. For all these reasons and others I have not spared trouble in
the various revisions referred to; I think the book has been kept by them
fairly abreast of its author's knowledge, and I hope it is not too far
behind that of others.

It will, however, almost inevitably happen that a long series of piecemeal
corrections and codicils somewhat disfigures the character of the
composition as a whole. And after nearly the full score of years, and not
much less than half a score of re-appearances, it has seemed to me
desirable to make a somewhat more thorough, minute, and above all connected
revision than I have ever made before. And so, my publishers falling in
with this view, the present edition represents the result. I do not think
it necessary to reprint the original preface. When I wrote it I had already
had some, and since I wrote it I have had much more, experience in writing
literary history. I have never seen reason to alter the opinion that, to
make such history of any value at all, the critical judgments and
descriptions must represent direct, original, and first-hand reading and
thought; and that in these critical judgments and descriptions the value of
it consists. Even summaries and analyses of the matter of books, except in
so far as they are necessary to criticism, come far second; while
biographical and bibliographical details are of much less importance, and
may (as indeed in one way or another they generally must) be taken at
second hand. The completion of the _Dictionary of National Biography_ has
at once facilitated the task of the writer, and to a great extent disarmed
the candid critic who delights, in cases of disputed date, to assume that
the date which his auth