Page:New Poems by James I.djvu/23

 Mr. Rait does not call attention to the fact that this appears in The Essayes of a Prentise.

VIII. 'This Lairgeness and this Breadth so Long'. . . A Pairt of Du Bartas First Day, pp. 54-56.

IX. On his own Destiny. . . The Beginning of his Mties Jurnei, pp. 52-53.

X. The CI Psalm. . . Not in the Museum MS.

XI. 'His Maiesties Letter unto Mr. Du Bartas' ... A letter in French inviting the poet to Scotland. Cf. App. I, IV, p. 60.

XII. Supplement to the Preface of the Βασιλικὸν Δῶρον. . . A paragraph explaining his attacks on the Puritans. Not in the Museum MS.

It will be seen that the titles in the Museum MS. frequently indicate the occasions or sources of the poems. Obscurities and breaks in the Bodleian MS. are also at times remedied in the Museum copy. The Bodleian, it is true, presents the poems in the dialect in which they were originally written; but it was the King's intention and it will be the preference of many readers that his verse, like his prose, should appear in the more familiar, not to say less uncouth, Southern language and spelling. The change is made without seriously affecting either the meter or the sense. Aside from the relative merits of the texts, it is desirable to have together in convenient form all the verse of the King not in The Essayes of a Prentise or the Exercises at vacant houres.

In printing the poems it has seemed advisable, even in the cases of the half dozen or more poems published in the King's lifetime, to follow carefully the punctuation of the MS. This, though scanty, is not seriously misleading, if one remembers that the pauses at the ends of lines are usually unmarked. In spelling, the long s has been discarded, and the scribal interchange of u, v, and w, and of i and j, brought into conformity with modern usage. In other respects, both spelling and capitalization (save in the titles) follow the original exactly, and have been