Excerpt from A History of English Prosody, Vol. 3: From the Twelfth Century to the Present Day The Preface of the second volume of this book was much shorter than the Preface of the first this shall be shorter still, indeed of the shortest. For I have endeavoured to say in the body of the text what I thought material, and I do not wish to say anything immaterial either here or elsewhere. I have only to thank critics for the kindness with which the work has been generally received hitherto; to hope that this part of it - the most difficult and trying, no doubt, of the three, as touching matters most inter esting to most people - will not be found unworthy of the continuance of that kindness; to apologise to any one whom I may have offended, in any of the senses of that word, while writing on a matter where offence is very hard to avoid unless one writes with a flavourless and colourless scholasticism and to make my bow. 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.