the understanding of the reader ... Mr. F.G. Kenyon has been kind enough
to make the notes for 'The Ring and the Book,' but for the rest the
editor alone is responsible." The text is that of the edition of 1889,
1894, but the arrangement is more strictly chronological. The notes are
throughout unnecessary and to be regretted.




II.

REPRINT OF DISCARDED PREFACES TO THE FIRST EDITIONS OF SOME OF
BROWNING'S WORKS


1. Preface to _Paracelsus_ (1835).

"I am anxious that the reader should not, at the very outset,--mistaking
my performance for one of a class with which it has nothing in
common,--judge it by principles on which it has never been moulded, and
subject it to a standard to which it was never meant to conform. I
therefore anticipate his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more
novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers,
whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the passions,
by the operation of persons or events; and that, instead of having
recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the
crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely
the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency
by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in
its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether