INDEXES AND ANTHOLOGIES.
[To THE EDITOR OF TEE " SPECTATOR.".1 SIR,—Will you allow me, after much long-suffering, to appeal to the editors of future poetical anthologies, even though I move their contempt ? Take two specimens; one a classic "The Golden Treasury," and the other on the way to become so, Mr. Beeching's "Paradise of English Poetry ;" both are largely spoilt for a busy man for want of an index of subjects or titles. The indexes of first lines and authors' names, particularly with the cumbrous Roman numerals of the " Treasury " (far the worst offender of the two, as, I admit; the " Paradise " would not be quite so easily indexed), very seriously militates against the use of these books for reference to a particular piece at a moment's notice when one has forgotten the first line. " But you ought to remember it !" maybe an editor might reply. Ay, there's the rub, when one has a hopeless memory, and yet is none the less a man who greatly values such anthologies. One would fain turn to Wordsworth's " Intimations " in the " Treasury." Forgetting the first line, one index is consequently useless, and you have to hunt through the pieces as numbered and attached to his name in the other index, to find it finally, the forty-first piece of his, No. cclxxxvii. What can be the possible object of a name and more than six lines of numbers, or of separating authors' names from their first lines ? One index would be infinitely better than the two. Ought an editor to take such things as abundant leisure and a good memory for granted; or, indeed, anything at all in English literature except abnormal ignorance ? I remember the master who taught us this subject at school, himself a distinguished scholar, always taking it for granted that anything at all well known had been taught us in our respective nurseries,— a very large, and, in my case, disastrous, assumption, in- ducing me to take many a masterpiece for granted as read. However, to return to my plea : do let me beg, ad miseri- cordiam, for such an index in future editions as Mr. A. H. Miles gives in his "Poets and Poetry of the Century," or as there is in the volumes of the Canterbury poets. Is there any mystic reason why not? I can imagine one; but life nowa- days is too exacting to admit it, and mine is the cry of the man in the street.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Previous page
