Page:Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc., being selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson.djvu/19

 PREFATORY NOTE

HIS small volume of selections is the first-fruits of my work at the Remains of Crabb Robinson, preserved in Dr. Williams's Library: on this I have been engaged, with interruptions due to the war, since 1912. My intention is ultimately to publish all the correspondence and all those parts of the Diary and Reminiscences which are of interest from the standpoint of literary history. The task is a lengthy one, and meanwhile, since Sadler's edition, originally published in 1869, though in some respects excellent, has long been out-of-print, and is, moreover, badly-proportioned and unreliable, it is thought that a selection from the large mass of available material may prove welcome to many readers. The Blake Reminiscences were put together by Crabb Robinson in 1825: they are to be found at the end of the first volume of the Reminiscences which were compiled by him from the journals and from memory between 1845 and 1853. Many, but not all, of the passages relating to Blake have already been printed in Gilchrist's Life, and elsewhere. I have reprinted only those which are not found substantially in the extracts from H. C. R.'s letters and from his Diary, which are here given the preference since they have the interest of contemporary impressions, as distinct from the later less vivid criticism.

The early part of the Diary is full of references to the great writers of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and especially to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb, with whom H. C. R. was in close personal intercourse. Many such passages are known from Sadler's volumes, but H. C. R.'s own selections from his many memories of them have not hitherto been printed. These Reminiscences extend from the year 1808 to 1829, and were penned in his old age between 1849 and 1853. These, too, are supplemented, and in some cases, where the accounts over-lap, replaced, first by Crabb Robinson's references to Coleridge's lectures in both his Diary and correspondence, (much of this material has not previously been printed,) and secondly by the