OF THOMAS GRAY INCLUDING THE CORRESPONDENCE EDITED BY DUNCAN C. TOVEY EDITOR OF "GRAY AND HIS FRIENDS," ETC, VOL. I LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1900 PREFACE. IF I had their permission, I should like to dedicate this volume to four kindly correspondents whom it has never been my privilege to meet, but to whose encouragement in this, or comments on my previous work on Gray, I am much indebted. These are Professors Hales and Dowden on this side of the Atlantic, and Professors Phelps and d Kittredge on the other. I am able to face once more some adverse and captious criticism, in the belief that my W labours on Gray seem to them neither superfluous, nor, in spite of errors and oversights which, of all students of the poet they are best able to detect, unscholarly. And I must also record my obligations to my friend Canon Ainger, Master of the Temple, and to Dr. Butler, the Master of Trinity, Cambridge as well as many others-whose judgment none could venture to question, and whose approval of my edition of Gray's poems has kept me in good heart under many inevitable difficulties and delays in the production of the present volume. My two sons, Duncan Tovey, late of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and Donald F. Tovey, late of Balliol, have given me substantial help, the first by investigating for me in the British Museum, and the second in the notes which bear upon music. In all other instances I trust that my indebtedness has been scrupulously acknowledged in the notes themselves. In particular I shall be sorry if anywhere I have inadvertently appropriated what is Mitford's. I have at least restored to him much that is his own. He was a most valuable 1 "From Mitford" after a note means that his note has been either shortened or in some way corrected or improved in detail. |