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Preface and Acknowledgements
describing Porson's visit to the Continent, I have preferred
the reading that makes Professor Brunck occupant
of the Chair at Frankfort rather than the popular
variant that places him at Strasbourg. The point is perhaps
less important than it appears at first sight, for
Porson never visited the Continent at all.
I have followed tradition in ascribing the lines on An
Austrian Army to Alaric A. Watts, who, according to
his son and biographer, contributed them to the Literary
Gazette in 1820; there is, however, some evidence that
they first appeared a few years earlier in The Trifler, a
periodical written by the boys of Westminster School.
The couplet on Cardinal Wolsey I have described as
anonymous, though E. H. Barker (Literary Anecdotes,
1852) ascribes it to 'Mr Pitt, the translator of Virgil'
(Christopher Pitt, 1699-1748). Southey's March to
Moscow I have ruthlessly compressed. The well-known
lines on Boston I have called anonymous in honour of
the unknown Harvard man who drew their first rough
draft; but they owe their present perfection to the protracted
labours of Dr J. C. Bossidy (1860-1928); Dr S. C.
Bushnell (1852-1930) and others. The lines on the
amoeba, which appear anonymously in Life, by Sir
Arthur Shipley, I have ascribed (on the authority of the
Cambridge University Press) to Sir Arthur himself.
No anthologist who has to cover familiar as well as
unfamiliar ground can wholly avoid the paths of his
predecessors; and it is with real gratitude that I acknowledge
my debt to Sir John Squire's Comic Muse, to Mr
Knox's Humorous Verse, and to the more specialized
collections of Charles Whibley, Mr W. H. Beable, and
Mr G. R. Hamilton. There is perhaps no need to state
in detail my general obligations to these and earlier authorities,
but some of my more specific debts to modern
editors and anthologists I must, however, acknowledge
more precisely. The Wife who would a Wanton be I have
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