be; but they were cherished by most of the critical journals, and conciliated for me the good-will of some of the most influential writers who were at that time engaged in periodical literature, though I was personally unknown to them. They bestowed upon the poem abundant praise, passed over most of its manifold faults, and noticed others with indulgence. Miss Seward wrote some verses upon it in a strain of the highest eulogy and the bitterest invective; they were sent to the Morning Chronicle, and the editor (Mr. Perry) accompanied their insertion with a vindication of the opinions which she had so vehemently denounced. Miss Seward was then in high reputation; the sincerity of her praise was proved by the severity of her censure, and nothing could have been more serviceable to a young author than her notice thus indignantly but also thus generously bestowed. The approbation of the reviewers served as a passport for the poem to America, and it was reprinted there while I was revising it for a second edition.

A work, in which the author and the bookseller had engaged with equal imprudence, thus proved beneficial to both. It made me so advantageously known as a poet, that no subsequent hostility on the part of the reviews could pull down the reputation which had been raised by

their good offices. Before that hostility took its determined character, the charge of being a hasty and careless writer was frequently brought against me. Yet to have been six months correcting what was written in six weeks, was some indication of patient industry; and of this the second edition gave farther evidence. Taking for a second motto the words of Erasmus, Ut homines ita libros, indies seipsis meliores fieri oportet, I spared no pains to render the poem less faulty both in its construction and composition; I wrote a new beginning, threw out much of what had remained of the original draught, altered more, and endeavoured from all the materials which I had means of consulting, to make myself better acquainted with the manners and circumstances of the fifteenth century. Thus the second edition differed almost as much from the first, as that from the copy which was originally intended for publication. Less extensive alterations were made in two subsequent editions; the fifth was only a reprint of the fourth; by that time I had become fully sensible of its great and numerous faults, and requested the reader to remember, as the only apology which could be offered for them, that the poem was written at the age of nineteen, and published at one-and-twenty. My intention then

of which the inherent defects were incorrigible, and I did not look into it again for many years.

But now, when about to perform what at my age may almost be called the testamentary task of revising, in all likelihood for the last time, those works by which it was my youthful ambition "to be for ever known," and part whereof I dare believe has been "so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die," it appeared proper that this poem, through which the author had been first made known to the public, two-and-forty years ago, should lead the way; and the thought that it was once more to pass through the press under my own inspection, induced a feeling in some respects resembling that with which it had been first delivered to the printer, .. and yet how different! For not in hope and ardour, nor with the impossible intention of rendering it what it might have been had it been planned and executed in middle life, did I resolve to correct it once more throughout; but for the purpose of making it more consistent with itself in diction, and less inconsistent in other things with the well-weighed opinions of my maturer years. The faults of effort, which may generally be regarded as hopeful indications in a juvenile writer, have been mostly left as they were. language which remained from the

The faults of

first edition

have been removed, so that in this respect the whole is sufficiently in keeping. And for those which expressed the political prejudices of a young man who had too little knowledge to suspect his own ignorance, they have either been expunged, or altered, or such substitutions have been made for them as harmonize with the pervading spirit of the poem, and are nevertheless in accord with those opinions which the author has maintained for thirty years through good and evil report, in the maturity of his judgement as well as in the sincerity of his heart.

Keswick, August 30. 1837.