It is in the History of Animals that the student of literature will
find the richest mine of allusions. The list of similes in Shakespeare
explained by our author would fill a volume like this itself. Other
writers, again, simply "lift" the book wholesale. Chester and Du
Bartas write page after page of rhyme, all but versified direct from
Bartholomew. Jonson and Spenser, Marlowe and Massinger, make ample use
of him. Lyly and Drayton owe him a heavy debt. Considerations of space
forbid their insertion, but for every extract made here, the Editor
has collected several passages from first-class authors with a view to
illustrating the immense importance of this book to Elizabethan
literature. It was not without reason that Ireland chose justified,
when making a selection of passages from the work for modern readers,
in altering his text to this extent--and this only: he has modernised
the spelling, and in the case of entirely obsolete grammatical forms
he has substituted modern ones (_e.g._ "its" for "his"). In the
case of an utterly dead word he has followed the course of
substituting a word from the same root, when one exists; and when none
could be found, he has left it unchanged in the text. Accordingly a
short glossary has been added, which includes, too, many words which
we may hope are not dead, but sleeping. In very few cases has a word
been inserted, and in those it is marked by italics.

Perhaps we may be allowed to say a word in defence of the principle of
modernising our earliest literature. Early English poetry is, in
general (with some striking exceptions), incapable of being written in
the spelling of our days without losing all of that which makes it
verse; but there can be no reason, when dealing with the masterpieces
of our Early English prose, for maintaining obsolete forms of spelling
and grammar which hamper the passage of thought from mind to mind