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xii only to administer small doses by way of provocatives, while the object of the "Select Poets" is to supply true adorers with copious draughts, unadulterated, from the well-head of the Sacred Waters.—There are many would-be admirers who will perhaps expect the editor to draw also of every green ditch and muddy pond in the Delphian country, and their ostrich-stomachs may be balked in not finding any crude, tough, juiceless substances, whereon they may try their marvellous powers of digestion—but this selection is planned with a ruthless regard to intrinsic value, and the editor's opinion that age, when not dignified by worth, is most unreverend and despised, must be a death blow to their hopes. But somewhat too much of this. The author of the first part of the present poem demands attention.

The life of this blazing, though transitory meteor, is shrouded in great obscurity. The place and date of his birth, and the circumstances of his parents are alike unknown; Oldys says that he was born about the former part of