PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN TO MY OXFORD FRIENDS 1869-1909 ‘They have seemed to be together, though absent, shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds.’ PREFACE This volume consists of lectures delivered during my tenure of the Chair of Poetry at Oxford and not included in Shakespearean Tragedy. Most of them have been enlarged, and all have been revised. As they were given at intervals, and the majority before the publication of that book, they contained repetitions which I have not found it possible wholly to remove. Readers of a lecture published by the University of Manchester on English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth will pardon also the restatement of some ideas expressed in it. This The several lectures are dated, as I have been unable to take account of most of the literature on their subjects published since they were delivered. They are arranged in the order that seems best to me, but it is of importance only in the case of the four which deal with the poets of Wordsworth’s time. I am indebted to the Delegates of the University Press, and to the proprietors and editors of the Hibbert Journal and the Albany, Fortnightly, and Quarterly Reviews, respectively, for permission to republish the first, third, fifth, eighth, and ninth lectures. A like acknowledgment is due for leave to use some sentences of an article on Keats contributed to Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1903). In the revision of the proof-sheets I owed much help to a sister who has shared many of my Oxford friendships. NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION This edition is substantially identical with the first; but it and its later impressions contain a few improvements in points of detail, and, thanks to criticisms by my brother, F. H. Bradley, I hope to have made my meaning clearer in some pages of the second lecture. This There was an oversight in the first edition which I regret. In adding the note on p. 247 I forgot that I had not referred to Professor Dowden in the lecture on “Shakespeare the Man.” In everything that I have written on Shakespeare I am indebted to Professor Dowden,
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