Excerpt from Richard Middleton: The Man and His Work A brief Preface is needed to acknowledge indebtedness to three of my friends - Herbert Garland, Louis J. Mcquilland and Arthur Machen - all of Whom knew Middleton in the flesh, and who have been good enough to advise me in the preparation of this memoir. Mcquilland, who read the memoir in proof, tells me I should have dealt more fully with Middleton as a writer of fiction. I have to some small extent remedied the deficiency by making additions to the biblio graphical notes. Much with me, in writing the book, was the desire to make more widely known Middleton's excellence as a poet. His prose fantasy, The Ghost Ship, is now generally acknow ledged to be one of the best short stories in the English language, but it seems to me that he is too much considered as the author of that story and at the expense of his poetry. I hope I have done a little towards arousing a wider interest in Poems and Songs, though very conscious that the expression has fallen short of the dream. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.