Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 2.djvu/13

Rh familiar, but details and particulars are out of the immediate reach of even the most cultivated readers.

The poem may be dealt with in two ways. It may be regarded as a repertory or treasury of brilliant passages for selection and quotation; or it may be read continuously, and with some attention to the style and message of the author. It is in the belief that Childe Harold should be read continuously, and that it gains by the closest study, reassuming its original freshness and splendour, that the text as well as Byron's own notes have been somewhat minutely annotated.

In the selection and composition of the notes I have, in addition to other authorities, consulted and made use of the following editions of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:—

i. Édition Classique, par James Darmesteter, Docteur-ès-lettres. Paris, 1882.

ii. Byron's Childe Harold, edited, with Introduction and Notes, by H. F. Tozer, M.A. Oxford, 1885 (Clarendon Press Series).

iii. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, edited by the Rev. E. C. Everard Owen, M.A. London, 1897 (Arnold's British Classics).

Particular acknowledgments of my indebtedness to these admirable works will be found throughout the volume.

I have consulted and derived assistance from Professor Eugen Kölbing's exhaustive collation of the text of the two first cantos with the Dallas Transcript in