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PREFACE.
lxv

more important avocations, which, in the first instance, caused the substitution, have since operated to prevent the explanation; and the writer of the preceding desultory remarks, and of a few trifling notes on the text, is thus left to request for himself the poetical collector's indulgence towards the inevitable errors of an unpractised hand.

For the possessors of this volume, however, the above mentioned delay was lucky: as it has been the means of furnishing them with the following curious minim of information, which occurred the other day in a shrewd little periodical work, entitled, "The British Stage." The article is on Marlowe[1], who is well defended by the ingenious writer from the charge of atheism; and, in its turn, the puzzling question of the poet's death and the name of his opponent

  1. The critic says of the "Hero and Leander," that "It is scarcely hazarding too much to assert, that a more exquisite specimen of poetical ideas, clothed in elegant and harmonious language, does not exist. His Lucan and Ovid have little less merit;—"