deavoured to reproduce where possible the suggestions of the early texts as to the scansion of these scenes, but where, as is often the case, those suggestions are wanting, and the printing of the lines is merely arbitrary, he has arranged the lines in the closest likeness to blank verse that their hasty construction, confused by the constant elision of final vowels and the smaller and more usual monosyllables, and by the frequent use of half-lines in exclamatory passages, may be allowed to bear. In the notes an endeavour has been made to connect the poems and letters as far as possible with Suckling's life and the history of his day, and to trace his allusions to contemporary, and, where necessary, to earlier literature. Here and there allusion has been made to some of the more valuable comments signed 'W. W.,' which are written in a copy of the 1658 edition of the poems, and have been assigned to Wordsworth. These comments, from internal evidence alone, cannot be the work of Wordsworth, although the volume in which they occur seems to have belonged to him, and to contain notes which are his.
Mr. Carew Hazlitt, in his edition of Suckling's works for the Library of Old Authors, included a certain amount of new matter, notably two letters, one of which, addressed to Davenant, was printed from MS. Ashmole 826, f. 101, and the other to Sir Henry Vane, from S. P. Dom. Chas. I., vol. ccxvi., p. 6. The second of these is printed as an Appendix to the present volume, from a copy of the original made by the editor. In addition to these, an Appendix to Mr. Hazlitt's edition contains four satires on Suckling, three of which deal with his flight to France, and an anonymous elegy on his death. It is apparent that, while Suckling's somewhat riotous life and conversation excited the enmity of Puritans, his ostentation, of which examples already have been given, made him ridiculous in the eyes of less bigoted contemporaries. At the same time it is impossible to doubt that beneath a gay and careless exterior he possessed sound practical sense, and that his ambition to excel as an amateur wit only too often concealed a high, if somewhat fragile, poetic gift, which on happy occasions rose superior to an atmosphere not a little hostile to its full development.
