PREFACE.

years 1839 and 1870.

THIS Book contains the substance of ten small volumes published between the Many of these have gone through four and five editions, and are now out of print. The volume also includes several pieces published anonymously in periodicals and magazines during the last ten years, and which have not before been collected, as well as others now for the first time printed. The poems in the series entitled "Drum Beats and Alarm Bells" were not originally published in this form, or as a connected whole, but were scattered over various periodicals between the years 1847 and 1873. They are now brought into one focus, to show their unity of thought and purpose, and to make them reflect light upon each other, and upon some of the most memorable events of the successive revolutions that have afflicted France for upwards of eighty years, and that are not yet concluded.

The volume, rearranged and carefully revised, contains as complete a collection of his poetical works as the author desires to make. If it include compositions which merit no higher designation than that of verse-a fact of which the author is painfully aware-he can only urge in extenuation of his fault in reproducing them, that these particular compositions-such as "There's a good time coming,' 'Cheer, boys, cheer,' and others of a like class—were and still are highly popular, and that the collection might by many, in whose opinion he desires to stand well, be held incomplete without them. In whatever he has written he never courted popularity, but simply wrote because he could not help uttering the thought that was in him, and because the thought spontaneously took the lyrical form. And if some of his worst compositions have been the greatest favourites of the public, and some of his very best have remained unknown, he attributes the fact, not to the public love of inferiority, but to the constant iteration that is the result of a melody which pleases the ear, and floats upon the memory of the people.

London, September, 1876.