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Thanks all, what a very peculiar poem!

Am missing first letter of twenty down.help appreciated.

Hi, Macky,

It’s an H. The clue is an &lit type, with “honorific title” = HE ( His Excellency), “leader of troops” = T, above “ranker” = MAN.

Thankyou

I've done everything except highlight the poet's discovery. In the poem, I notice he discovers "thee", who are the person in the 8th row of the grid, but that won't do. Neither will the bottom row, which is three words in the poem but 12 letters.

Think diagonally....

Thanks, chips, I see now!

All done and dusted. Just one query: are we supposed to include the five letters outside the grid?I don’t suppose it matters either way, but it would look rather messy if one did.

I presume so as there is no mention in the preamble of removing them in the endgame.

It's an interesting point you raise, Xij. Given the precedence of the 'hare' needing to be highlighted outside the grid, you might wonder just how far outside the perimeter of the grid is the admissible range for these letters. What I'm getting at is that only about 3cm to the left of row 8 there already is an 'o' in the phrase 'to arrive by'; only about 1.5cm below column 2 there is already the letter 'e' in the preamble word 'extend'; at about 2cm below column 5 there already is the letter 'n' in the preamble; at about 8.5cm to the right of row 8 there already is the letter 'n' in a jumbo crossword clue. In fact it seems to me that, given the lack of further specification in the preamble, it would be admissible to submit the grid with only one 'extra-grid' added letter, that is the 'd' above column 11. That is, provided that you include enough of the surrounding paper together with the grid so that the letters mentioned above are visible...there is nothing in the preamble to say that this would be wrong...