PREFACE. As confidently as any one of his contemporaries THOMAS HOOD may claim his place among the Standard Poets of Great Britain. The present edition of his poetical works contains all the poems included in the two volumes edited at his request, and published in London by Mr. Moxon. To these we have added a number of poems collected from other reliable sources, which were probably excluded from the Moxon edition by outstanding copyrights, with which their republication would interfere. This may therefore be regarded as the most complete collection of Hood's Poetical Works yet published. His friends assert that in the twenty years during which Hood was writing for the press he never penned a line intended to give pain to an individual, or which he might himself wish to blot. This is the praise which Lyttelton awarded to the author of "The Seasons," and is almost too much to ascribe to any individual who, like Hood, was a man of ardent feelings and exposed to strong temptations. It is enough that we are able to say of him, as Walter Scott said of Goldsmith that his WREATH IS UNSULLIED. A* - |