volume form will also be found to be out of their chronological
position, partly because it has seemed to me best to give prominence to
those verses which Lamb himself reprinted, and partly because there is
often no indication of the year in which the poem was written.

Another difficulty has been the frequency with which Lamb reprinted some
of his earlier poetry. The text of many of his earliest and best poems
was not fixed until 1818, twenty years or so after their composition. It
had to be decided whether to print these poems in their true order as
they were first published--in Coleridge's _Poems on Various Subjects_,
1796; in Charles Lloyd's _ems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer_, 1796;
in Coleridge's _Poems_, second edition, 1797; in _Blank Verse_ by
Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, 1798; and in John Woodvil, 1802--with
all their early readings; or whether to disregard chronological
sequence, and wait until the time of the _Works_--1818--had come, and
print them all together then. I decided, in the interests of their
biographical value, to print them in the order as they first appeared,
particularly as Crabb Robinson tells us that Lamb once said of the
arrangement of a poet's works: "There is only one good order--and that
is the order in which they were written--that is a history of the poet's
mind." It then had to be decided whether to print them in their first
shape, which, unless I repeated them later, would mean the relegation of
Lamb's final text to the Notes, or to print them, at the expense of a
slight infringement upon the chronological scheme, in their final 1818
state, and relegate all earlier readings to the Notes. After much
deliberation I decided that to print them in their final 1818 state was
best, and this therefore I did in the large edition of 1903, to which
the student is referred for all variorum readings, fuller notes and many
illustrations, and have repeated here. In order, however, that the
scheme of Lamb's 1818 edition of his _Works_ might be preserved, I have