PREFACE.

SEVERAL years ago, in the Introduction of my "Letters to Mr. Charles Butler, vindicating the Book of the Church," I had occasion to state that, while a school-boy at Westminster, I had formed an intention of exhibiting the most remarkable forms of Mythology which have at any time obtained among mankind, by making each the groundwork of a narrative poem. The performance, as might be expected, fell far short of the design, and yet it proved something more than a dream of juvenile ambition.

I began with the Mahommedan religion, as being that with which I was then best acquainted myself, and of which every one who had read the Arabian Nights' Entertainments possessed all the knowledge necessary for readily understanding and

entering into the intent and spirit of the poem. Mr. Wilberforce thought that I had conveyed in it a very false impression of that religion, and that the moral sublimity which he admired in it was owing to this flattering misrepresentation. But Thalaba the Destroyer was professedly an Arabian Tale. The design required that I should bring into view the best features of that system of belief and worship which had been developed under the Covenant with Ishmael, placing in the most favourable light the morality of the Koran, and what the least corrupted of the Mahommedans retain of the patriarchal faith. It would have been altogether incongruous to have touched upon the abominations engrafted upon it; first by the false Prophet himself, who appears to have been far more remarkable for audacious profligacy than for any intellectual endowments, and afterwards by the spirit of Oriental despotism which accompanied Mahommedanism wherever it was established.

Heathen Mythologies have generally been represented by Christian poets as the work of the Devil and his Angels; and the machinery derived from them was thus rendered credible, according to what

was during many ages a received opinion. The plan upon which I proceeded in Madoc was to produce the effect of machinery as far as was consistent with the character of the poem, by representing the most remarkable religion of the New World such as it was, a system of atrocious priestcraft. It was not here as in Thalaba the foundation of the poem, but, as usual in what are called epic poems, only incidentally connected with it.

When I took up, for my next subject, that mythology which Sir William Jones had been the first to introduce into English poetry, I soon perceived that the best mode of treating it would be to construct a story altogether mythological. In what form to compose it was then to be determined. No such question had arisen concerning any of my former poems. I should never for a moment have thought of any other measure than blank verse for Joan of Arc, and for Madoc, and afterwards for Roderick. The reason why the irregular rhymeless lyrics of Dr. Sayers were preferred for Thalaba was, that the freedom and variety of such verse were suited to the story. Indeed, of all the laudatory criticisms with which I have been favoured during