INTRODUCTION
The series of lectures contained in this volume, although now somewhat revised and extended, formed the initial course, as delivered in 1891, of the Percy Turnbull Memorial Lectureship of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University. In founding that lectureship, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull commemorated the name of their son, Percy Graeme Turnbull, who died in 1887, having nearly completed his ninth year. The brief life of a child, who gave promise of fulfilling the utmost wishes of parents devoted to things good and fair, has been of higher service than that which many whose lights "burn to the socket" are permitted to render.
In conformity with the terms of the gift, a course of lectures is to be delivered annually by some maker or critical student of poetry. There is but one other foundation dedicated to this art alone, as far as I can learn, among British and American universities, that being the chair endowed at Oxford by Henry Birkhead, in 1708, from which much learned argument
