To the memory of those truly cultured and unselfish men, the poet-scribes
and hedge-schoolmasters of the last century and the beginning of this—men
who may well be called the last of the Milesians—I dedicate this effort
to preserve even a scrap of that native lore which in their day they
loved so passionately, and for the preservation of which they worked so
nobly, but in vain.