to the printer and cannot remember the name of my hero".
If the author forgets sometimes, the reader does so ofttimes.
There are, also, those forgetful ones who, like the professor,
could never remember whether Mr. Collins appears in
"Emma" or "Sense and Sensibility".

Similarly some record is plainly needed of the writings which
Shaw has scattered with a fine promiscuity in the periodicals
of England and America. For a bibliographer he has been a
tantalizing author. Our net has been a wide one, but we cannot
hope to have enmeshed all the fish from the vast Shavian seas,
though it will only be Shavian shrimps that have escaped.

We have few acknowledgments to make. We found useful
clues in Henderson's official life; but, for the rest, books about
Shaw are critical rather than informative and would not repay
milking. We have to acknowledge the assistance of a co-
adjutor who gave up much of his annual leave to forward
the tedious compilation of the last section of this work and to
con over the rest, and we have also to thank Mr. Ernest Rann
for wading through the proofs.

Last of all, we would record our indebtedness to those
officials who serve the cause of research among the books of
the British Museum. Their good offices conduce to the diver-
sion as well as the instruction of the reading public in ways
little imagined. Was it not, indeed, beneath the dome in
Bloomsbury that Shaw penned those obscure shorthand notes
that were the germ of his first play and the foundation of his
fame and fortune? We too, beneath the dome, have written
notes of rare obscurity.

We have had one regret in our compilation: that it implies
that the bulk of Shaw's work has been written. It is not
so much that we feel that Shaw's activities will be circum-
scribed by the normal courses of senectitude--no doubt he
will set Nature's Golden Rule at defiance--but that he seems
to have become infected by the taciturnity of the Ancients of
his own creation. During the past ten years his output in
books marks a decline in the prolificity of the two pre-

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