FORECAST.

ix

athwart Europe, from the orange groves of Lisbon to the olives of Thessaly-from his friendship with Shelley, and life at Meillerie with its loud joys and stains-through his wild revels of Venice his masterly verse-making his quietudes of Ravenna (where the Guiccioli shone) through his passionate zeal for Greece, and his last days at Missolonghi, with one brief glimpse of his final resting-place, beside his passionate Gordon mother, under the grim, old tower of Hucknall-Torkard. So long indeed do we dwell upon this Byronic episode, as to make of it the virtual pièce de résistance in the literary menu of these pages.

After the brusque and noisy King William there trails royally into view that Sovereign Victoria, over whose blanched head-in these very June days in which I write the bells are all ringing a joyous Jubilee for her sixtieth year of reign. But to our eye, and to these pages, she comes as a girl in her teens-modest, yet resolute and calm; and among her advisers we see the suave and courtly Melbourne; and among those who make parliamentary battle, in the Queen's young

years, that famed historian who has pictured the lives of her kinsfolk - William and Mary-in a way which will make them familiar in the ages to

come.

We have a glimpse, too, of the jolly Captain Marryat cracking his for'castle jokes, and of the somewhat tedious, though kindly, G. P. R. James, lifting his chivalric notes about men-at-arms and knightly adventures a belated hunter in the fields of ancient feudal gramarye.

And with this pennant of the old times of tourney flung to the sharp winds of these days, and shivering in the rude blasts-where anarchic threats lurk and murmur we close our preface, and bid our readers all welcome to the spread of - what our old friend Dugald Dalgetty would call-the Vivers.

EDGEWOOD, June 24, 1897.

D. G. M.