Page:Tamerlane and other poems (1884).djvu/23

 PREFACE

BY THE EDITOR.

HE same year that witnessed the publication, at Louth in Lincolnshire, of Alfred Tennyson's first schoolboy volume of verse also gave birth, at that literary capital of the United States of America which takes its name from another Lincolnshire town, to Edgar Poe's maiden book. Unlike the sumptuous and elegant "Poems by Two Brothers," however, which the adventurous publishers actually had the temerity to issue in large-paper form as well as in the ordinary size, Edgar Poe's volume (if it can be dignified with that designation) is the tiniest of tomes, numbering, inclusive of title and half-titles, only forty pages, and measuring 6⅜ by 4⅛ inches. Its