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PUBLISHERS' PREFACE
THE EDITORS of this book have been mindful that literature has always been addressed to what is today called the "general reader" and his enjoyment. The student's intelligent enjoyment of the literature of the British people has been their first concern, both in selecting the texts and in providing explanatory comment. The introductions and notes are designed to supply the information which will most readily remove the barriers of space and time and allow the reader to confront without obstacle the permanence of the literature's thought and art. The explanatory material constitutes a large body of scholarship, historical and critical; no pain has been spared to make this a work of sound and accurate learning. But the scholarship has constantly been directed to the primary end of making the literature speak for itself.
The first volume, BRITISH LITERATURE FROM BEOWULF TO SHERIDAN, is entirely the work of Hazelton Spencer, late of The Johns Hopkins University. The second volume, BRITISH LITERATURE FROM BLAKE TO THE PRESENT DAY, is the work of Mr. Spencer, Walter E. Houghton of Wellesley College, and Herbert Barrows of the University of Michigan. Mr. Spencer edited and annotated the texts which appear in "The Romantic Period" and wrote the biographical introductions in that section. (For slight changes in this material and for the General Introduction the publishers' editors assume responsibility.) Mr. Houghton, with the valuable aid of his wife, Esther Rhoads Houghton, contributed "The Victorian Period"; Mr. Barrows, "The Modern Period." Mr. Karl Shapiro wrote the essay on prosody which stands at the end of each volume.
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