Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/260



has long been a "felt" want (to use Dr. Chalmers' pet façon de parler) of a good, comprehensive, careful, and inexpensive edition of the English Poets, adapted to the advancing exigencies of the age, when the list of readers is multiplying so fast, and swelling with eager recruits from ranks which, a few years back, were presumed to confine their literary commerce to the autograph of a cross (duly certified by the officiating clergyman, as Smith His Mark) in the parish register, or any other succinct repository of popular belles lettres. All of a sudden, and with a concursus of impetuous speculation which bodes ill, we fear, for some of the speculators, there is a rush of "enterprising publishers" to minister to the necessities of the public. An Edinburgh bibliopole starts in hot haste—trusting doubtless to secure by pre-possession nine-tenths of the field—and issues in rapid succession Milton, Thomson, Young, Herbert, Collins, &c., in very "tall copies," at a surprisingly low "figure:" an edition of which we will say that the paper and print are a decided bargain, but the size an uncomfortable one, and the editor, whether judged by his antecedents or by "these presents," objectionable in various respects to all who desire a discreet, temperate, scholarly, industrious, and trustworthy guide along the sunny uplands and among the bosky dells of Parnassus. Then again Mr. Murray, of aristocratic prestige, and Mr. Routledge, of "Railway Library" celebrity, are each busy in their several spheres—though in neither case supplying a complete edition, but only sporadic issues; publishing such poets as they judge to be in more particular request. But the edition that, in our opinion, comes incomparably the nearest to the required standard—uniting whatever is essentially valuable in any rival or contemporary series, with special advantages and attractions all its own—is that superintended by Mr. Robert Bell, an accomplished, judicious, and soundly qualified man of letters, and to be published by John Parker and Son, in monthly volumes, the first of which is now before us, and ought soon to be before every one else who can boast of taste and half-a-crown.

The size is the best that could be chosen, foolscap octavo. The paper and type are on the whole unexceptionable. Three hundred pages—the third of them devoted to an original memoir of the poet, most carefully but not diffusely done, and introducing more new information than could have been supposed available after the exhaustive labours of preceding biographers—a jealously revised text, collated as only the unappreciated diligence of hard students like Mr. Bell can collate,—copious, but not pedantic or prolix notes, critical, historical, biographical, and generally illustrative—and all this, neatly "got up" in cloth, for the