Excerpt from A Book of Women's Verse One might imagine he was talking about some obscure and unnoticed tribe of the brute creation badgers perhaps, or Dartford warblers. He was for the first time calling the attention of the human race to the existence of women, which could only be demonstrated, apparently, by putting their works into anthologies. But the most notable thing is that like all his kind he was not only a humbug but a sly robber. That patronizing parenthesis about Dyce, without a word of acknowledgment, is the one reference in his preface to a man on whose labours he battened. Half his book - it might be very well if he admitted it, for Dyce was competent - came bodily out of Dyce. That was the only part of it worth printing. Dyce did all his research for him; the rest of his huge book was filled with the maundering prettinesses-of early nineteenth-century writers. His nores on the old poetesses are Dyce's rewritten, often not even that; that he was conscious of his dishonest intent is proved by the way in which here and there, with out any sensible reason, he changes with obtuse cunning the order of the transcribed extracts. He had not even the sense to see that at one place be copied from Dyce a highly ridiculous misprint! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.