Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 1.djvu/15

Rh has drawn his pen in the MSS. or Revises are marked MS. erased.

Poems and plays are given, so far as possible, in chronological order. Childe Harold and Don Juan, which were written and published in parts, are printed continuously; and minor poems, including the first four satires, have been arranged in groups according to the date of composition. Epigrams and. jeux d'esprit have been placed together, in chronological order, at the beginning of the seventh volume. A Bibliography of the poems will immediately precede the Index at the close of the seventh volume.

The edition contains at least thirty hitherto unpublished poems, including fourteen stanzas of the unfinished seventeenth canto of Don Juan, and a considerable fragment of the third part of The Deformed Transformed. The eleven unpublished poems from MSS. preserved at Newstead, which appear in the first volume, are of slight if any literary value, but they reflect with singular clearness and sincerity the temper and aspirations of the tumultuous and moody stripling to whom "the numbers came," but who wisely abstained from printing them himself.

Byron's notes, of which many are published for the first time, and editorial notes, enclosed in brackets, are printed immediately below the variæ lectiones. The editorial notes are designed solely to supply the reader with references to passages in other works illustrative