Note 1 — Le hore di recreatione:

In the case of most of the constituents of these volumes, there was little need of 'deliberating and pondering' like the excellent Sir Thomas Bertram, when he had to settle such weighty questions as whether his niece should or should not go out to dinner, and if so whether she should walk or drive. But it was not quite the same in regard to Albino and Bellama. The first claim of entrants here—rarity and novelty to the general, it has without question: for the book (though it seems to have been issued in two forms, or at least with two title-pages) is very uncommon, and the author has escaped the wide-encroaching net of the D.N.B. Nor could I allow this to be balanced by the dull, clumsy, philistine, hackneyed ribaldry of the nunnery scenes in the middle, or by a page of sheer nastiness at the end, which is a sort of concentration of Herrick's foulest epigrams. These things will happen: and they can be skipped. It gave one more serious pause that 'N. W.' seldom1 displays anything like the poetry which far more than compensates for much milder blots in Leoline and Sydanis, and that his book is written in a singular jargon almost as much out of the common way as the wildest freaks of Benlowes, but without their excuse of furor poeticus. What turned the scale in his favour, after more than one reading, was the increasing conviction that the book, in spite or perhaps to some extent because of its defects, is a really valuable document for the history of English Literature from the special point of view which was marked out in the General Introduction. It is noteworthy as a member, graceless and slatternly, but still a member, of that class of Heroic Poem which it has been one of my main objects to bring before the student. It is still more noteworthy in connexion with the history of English fiction as presenting a special variety of that kind. It was not till, for the purposes of this collection, and by the kindness of Professor Firth, who lent me his copy, I read the volume (I knew it before only by name and from the Censura Literaria) that a gap in my mind's atlas of that fiction was filled in satisfactorily.