PREFACE.

WHEN Madoc was brought to a close in the summer of 1799, Mr. Coleridge advised me to publish it at once, and to defer making any material alterations, if any should suggest themselves, till a second edition. But four years had passed over my head since Joan of Arc was sent to the press, and I was not disposed to commit a second imprudence. If the reputation obtained by that poem had confirmed the confidence which I felt in myself, it had also the effect of making me perceive my own deficiencies, and endeavour with all diligence to supply them. I pleased myself with the hope that it would one day be likened to Tasso's Rinaldo, and that as the Jerusalem had fulfilled the promise of better things whereof that poem was the pledge, so might Madoc be regarded in relation to the juvenile work which had preceded it. Thinking that this would probably be the greatest poem I should ever produce, my intention was to bestow upon it all possible care, as indeed I had determined never again to undertake any subject without due preparation. With this view it was my wish, before Madoc could be considered as completed, to see more of

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Wales than I had yet seen. This I had some opportunity of doing in the autumn of 1801, with my old friends and schoolfellows Charles Wynn and Peter Elmsley. And so much was I bent upon making myself better acquainted with Welsh scenery, manners, and traditions, than could be done by books alone, that if I had succeeded in obtaining a house in the Vale of Neath, for which I was in treaty the year following, it would never have been my fortune to be classed among the Lake Poets.

Little had been done in revising the poem till the first year of my abode at Keswick: there, in the latter end of 1803, it was resumed, and twelve months were diligently employed in reconstructing it. The alterations were more material than those which had been made in Joan of Arc, and much more extensive. In its original form the poem consisted of fifteen books, containing about six thousand lines. It was now divided into two parts, and enlarged in the proportion of a full third. Shorter divisions than the usual one of books, or cantos, were found more convenient; the six books therefore, which the first part comprised, were distributed in seventeen sections, and the other nine in twentyseven. These changes in the form of the work were neither capriciously made, nor for the sake of novelty. The story consisted of two parts, almost as distinct as the Iliad and Odyssey; and the subdivisions were in like manner indicated by the sub

ject.

The alterations in the conduct of the piece occasioned its increase of length.

When Matthew Lewis published the Castle Spectre, he gave as his reason for introducing negro guards in a drama which was laid in feudal times, that he thought their appearance would produce a good effect; and if the effect would have been better by making them blue instead of black, blue, said he, they should have been. He was not more bent upon pleasing the public by stage effect, (which no dramatist ever studied more successfully,) than I was upon following my own sense of propriety, and thereby obtaining the approbation of that fit audience, which, being contented that it should be few, I was sure to find. Mr. Sotheby, whose Saul was published about the same time as Madoc, said to me a year or two afterwards, "You and I, Sir, find that blank verse will not do in these days; we must stand upon another tack." Mr. Sotheby considered the decision of the Pie-Poudre Court as final. But my suit was in that Court of Equity which sooner or later pronounces unerringly upon the merits of the

case.

Madoc was immediately reprinted in America in numbers, making two octavo volumes. About nine years afterwards there appeared a paper in the Quarterly Review, which gave great offence to the Americans; if I am not mistaken in my recollections, it was the first in that journal which had

any such tendency. An American author, whose name I heard, but had no wish to remember, supposed it to have been written by me; and upon this gratuitous supposition, (in which, moreover, he happened to be totally mistaken,) he attacked me in a pamphlet, which he had the courtesy to send me, and which I have preserved among my Curiosities of Literature. It is noticed in this place, because, among other vituperative accusations, the pamphleteer denounced the author of Madoc as having "meditated a most serious injury against the reputation of the New World, by attributing its discovery and colonization to a little vagabond Welsh Prince." This, he said, "being a most insidious attempt against the honour of America and the reputation of Columbus." *

This poem was the means of making me personally acquainted with Miss Seward. Her encomiastic opinion of it was communicated to me through Charles Lloyd, in a way which required some courteous acknowledgement; this led to an interchange of letters, and an invitation to Lichfield, where, accordingly, I paid her a visit, when next on my

* The title of this notable pamphlet is, "The United States and England; being a Reply to the Criticism on Inchiquin's Letters, contained in the Quarterly Review for January 1814, New York: published by A. H. Inskeep; and Bradford and Inskeep, Philadelphia. Van Winkle and Wiley, Printers. 1815."