My collections insensibly assumed the proportions of the volume now submitted to the public; and in the process of seeing the sheets through the press certain supplementary Notes suggested themselves, and form an Appendix. It has been my endeavour to render the Index as complete a clue as possible to the whole of the matter within the covers.
As my thoughts carry me back to the time—it is fifty years—when I commenced my inquiries into literary antiquities, I see that I have lived to witness a new Hegira: New Ideas, New Tastes, New Authors. The American Market and the Shakespear movement[1] have turned everything and everybody upside down. But Time will prove the friend of some of us.
In the following pages I have avoided the repetition of particulars to be found in my Four Generations of a Literary Family, 1897, and in my Confessions of a Collector, 1897, so far as they concern the immediate subject-matter.
W. C. H.
Barnes Common, Surrey,
October 1904.
Footnotes
[1] See the writer's Shakespear, Himself and his Work: A Study from New Points of View, second edition, revised, with important additions, and several facsimiles, 8vo, 1903.
