PREFACE.

MOST of the pieces in this volume were written in early life, a few are comparatively of recent date, and there are some of them which lay unfinished for nearly thirty years.

Upon reading, on their first appearance, certain of these Ballads, and of the lighter pieces now comprised in the third volume of this collective edition, Mr. Edgeworth said to me, "Take my word for it, Sir, the bent of your genius is for comedy." I was as little displeased with the intended compliment as one of the most distinguished poets of this age was with Mr. Sheridan, who, upon returning a play which he had offered for acceptance at Drury Lane, told him it was a comical tragedy.

My late friend, Mr. William Taylor of Norwich, whom none who knew him intimately can ever call to mind without affection and regret, has this passage in his Life of Dr. Sayers: "Not long after this (the year 1800), Mr. Robert Southey visited

Norwich, was introduced to Dr. Sayers, and partook those feelings of complacent admiration which his presence was adapted to inspire.- Dr. Sayers pointed out to us in conversation, as adapted for the theme of a ballad, a story related by Olaus Magnus of a witch, whose coffin was confined by three chains, sprinkled with holy water; but who was, nevertheless, carried off by demons. Already, I believe, Dr. Sayers had made a ballad on the subject, so did I, and so did Mr. Southey; but after "seeing the Old Woman of Berkeley, we agreed in awarding to it the preference. Still, the very different manner in which each had employed the same basis of narration might render welcome the opportunity of comparison; but I have not found among the papers of Dr. Sayers a copy of his poem."

There is a mistake here as to the date. This, my first visit to Norwich, was in the spring of 1798; and I had so much to interest me there in the society of my kind host and friend Mr. William Taylor, that the mention at Dr. Sayers's table of the story in Olaus Magnus made no impression on me at the time, and was presently forgotten. Indeed, if I had known that either he or his friend had written or intended to write a ballad upon the subject, that knowledge, however much the story might have pleased me, would have withheld me from all

thought of versifying it. In the autumn of the same year, I passed some days at Hereford with Mr. William Bowyer Thomas, one of the friends with whom, in 1796, I had visited the Arrabida Convent near Setubal. By his means I obtained permission to make use of the books in the Cathedral Library, and accordingly I was locked up for several mornings in that part of the Cathedral where the books were kept in chains. So little were these books used at that time, that in placing them upon the shelves, no regard had been had to the length of the chains; and when the volume which I wished to consult was fastened to one of the upper shelves by a short chain, the only means by which it was possible to make use of it was, by piling upon the reading desk as many volumes with longer chains as would reach up to the length of its tether; then by standing on a chair, I was able to effect my purpose. There, and thus, I first read the story of the Old Woman of Berkeley, in Matthew of Westminster, and transcribed it into a pocket-book. I had no recollection of what had passed at Dr. Sayers's; but the circumstantial details in the monkish Chronicle impressed me so strongly, that I began to versify them that very evening. It was the last day of our pleasant visit at Hereford; and on the following morning the remainder of the Ballad was pencilled in a post-chaise on our way to Abberley.

Mr. Wathen, a singular and obliging person, who afterwards made a voyage to the East Indies, and published an account of what he saw there, traced for me a facsimile of a wooden cut in the Nuremberg Chronicle (which was among the prisoners in the Cathedral). It represents the Old Woman's forcible abduction from her intended place of burial. This was put into the hands of a Bristol artist; and the engraving in wood which he made from it was prefixed to the Ballad when first published, in the second volume of my poems 1799. The Devil alludes to it in his Walk, when he complains of a certain poet as having" put him in ugly ballads with libellous pictures for sale."

The passage from Matthew of Westminster was prefixed to the Ballad when first published, and it has continued to be so in every subsequent edition of my minor poems from that time to the present: for whenever I have founded either a poem, or part of one, upon any legend, or portion of history, I have either extracted the passage to which I was indebted, if its length allowed, or have referred to it. Mr. Payne Collier, however, after the Ballad, with its parentage affixed, had been twenty years before the public, discovered that I had copied the story from Heywood's Nine Books of various History concerning Women, and that I had not thought proper to acknowledge the obligation. The discovery is