HERE present to the world of scholarship the third and last instalment of the work which four years ago I set myself to accomplish, and of which I published the first instalment in the spring of 1889. I have faithfully endeavoured to redeem every pledge I made to the public and to myself, and to the best of my ability to render this work, which was begun and has been continued as a labour of love, a worthy contribution to English literature, a worthy example of German scholarship. The task has been a long and an onerous one; during its execution my health failed me repeatedly-to this, as well as to my resolve to explore every portion of the vast tract of Romantic literature that lay before me, and, I candidly confess it, to miscalculation of the complexity of the task, must be attributed the delay which has taken place in the issue of this third volume. I can, however, assure the subscribers to my work that, as regrettable as this delay may have appeared to some of them, it has enabled me to attain results of which I had no idea when I began my task. likewise sure of one other thing: without the intimate knowledge of Malory's work which I acquired by the drudgery of copying out the text with my own hand, of collating proof with original, and of compiling the critical apparatus, I could never have achieved the results which I set forth in the present volume. All who are familiar I am 988k N25 1887 v.3 |