"Reciter" is a nineteenth-century term used here for a collection of characteristically nineteenth-century poems that sound well and go well when spoken in a declamatory style. If recitation has died out in the family circle, reading aloud has not, and it is as material for this that the editor's anthology is ideally intended. He is not afraid to include many examples of "good bad verse" because he recognises that they echo something in all men's hearts. But he does not neglect better Kipling is here, of course, with Tennyson and Byron and Macaulay – ringing voices that may no longer be recited, as in earlier times, but can and should be read aloud with profit and pleasure.