commission and omission, gave rise to some of the most inveterate enmities I have experienced. I will honestly confess, especially as I had a nobler field of warfare to suffer in, that I would willingly not have aroused enmity by such means. I acknowledge also, that a young author was presumptuous in pronouncing judgment upon older men, some of whom made me blush afterwards with a better self-knowledge. I can only offer in excuse, that I had not at that time suffered enough myself, to be aware of the pain to be given in this way; and that I was a young student, full of my favourite writers, and regarding a satire as nothing but a pleasant thing in a book.

To omit this poem in the present collection, appeared to me, for various reasons, improper; but it has been altered to suit my present feelings; and if all the hostile passages have not been left out, the retention under the circumstances, is, I think, not unwarrantable. The passage on the late Mr. Gifford I have a value for, partly because Mr. Hazlitt liked it; but the chief reason why I let this and two others remain is, that if men have a right to quarrel personally with anything, it is with prosperous insincerity, and with inhumanities which neither age nor suffering do away. And I have another reason. I think it necessary, for the

sake of many interests, to shew that I have still arms at my side. I have no desire to use them. Never had I so little. But my determination to use them, if insisted upon, never was so great. I have made amends, by long and patient forbearance, for a young mistake; but injuries affecting more than myself, I will repel. This is a grave piece of discourse upon so light a ́subject; but criticism and poetry are apt to be cloud and sunshine.

To the Translations the originals have been appended, partly out of a recollection of the pleasure I used to feel when a boy, at seeing the Latin under Pope's Imitations of Horace; partly from a willingness to shew the pains taken to do the originals justice. I have translated the whole of Tasso's Amyntas, of Redi's Bacchus in Tuscany, and of the Lutrin of Boileau: the Bacchus, from good will; the two other poems, from a less voluntary motive. The Lutrin, fortunately, has not been published; for I doubt whether it would have been better received than the Bacchus and from the Amyntas I have retained only the Ode to the Golden Age, which I fear is the only really fine thing in the original. Of the Bacchus and the Lutrin, I have given such specimens as I thought might afford the reader some gratification. I speak, of

d

course, only of the translations: though I doubt, however well they might have been rendered, whether in England we could have received anything like such a pleasure from them, as the French and Italians do from the originals, owing to our want of intimacy with the same customs. The Lutrin has a "catholic" relish with it; but not in the truly learned and universal sense of Sancho Panza's draught out of the flask ; and Redi's wines become flat by importation.

Let me take this opportunity of saying, that with all the praise occasionally bestowed upon the serious powers of Theocritus, and his indications of a genius for epic poetry, I am not aware that justice has been done to the wonderful evidences he has given of a combination of faculties for the light and the passionate, the social and the sequestered, the humorous and the pathetic, the minute and the grand. This delightful poet courts a milk-maid or a sea-nymph with equal fitness of address; is a countryman and a townsman; a clown, a courtier, and a satirist; fills a house at midnight with ghastly phenomena; describes a piece of pugilism in a style to make the bones of the " Fancy" crack under them; and makes us at once shudder and pity the great monster Polypheme, whom he reconciles to humanity by subduing with love. Then there is

his Hylas, disappearing under the water like a falling star; and his lion at noon-day, with all the villagers indoors around him; and his infant Hercules, the little jovial potency, the true infant demi-god, tearless and sovereign, of whose encounter with the Serpents I have endeavoured to give some idea. If Theocritus had written an epic, the world would have had a poet unknown to it, a romance-writer equally great for abundance and concentration, a Greek Ariosto.

I fear I have indeed been gossiping in this preface, and that I shall be thought by some to have wasted a great many words upon rhyme and numbers, things a little too much forgotten perhaps in the general poetry of the age. There is enough romance however in my volume to save me from the charge of a mechanical impertinence, when I venture to congratulate the reader on the manifest failure of that prophecy, which announced the downfall of all poetry and fiction in the ascendancy of the steam engine, and would fain have persuaded us, that the heart, and imagination, and flesh and blood of man, were to quit him at the approach of science and utilitarianism, and leave him nothing but his ribs to reckon upon. O believe it not! Count it not feasible, or in nature! The very flowers on the tea-cups, the grace with which a ball of cotton is rolled

up, might have shewn to the contrary. You must take colour out of the grass first, preference out of the

fancy, passion out of the blood.

the more thirst. The want

Nay the more drought, makes the wish. You

may make sects in opinion, and formalize a people for a while, here and there; but you cannot undo human nature. The very passion that makes them obstinate in what is formal, shall counteract itself in the blood of their children, and betray them back to imagination. Opinion may dogmatize; science may be mechanical in its operation; but in explaining one cause, it only throws us back upon another, and opens a wider and remoter world for the fancy to riot in. And the operators, by very reason of the solid footing they require, are apt to lose themselves most, if they do not hold fast. Newton himself got into strange border-lands of dissent. Pascal was a hypochondriacal dreamer. With the growth of this formidable mechanical epoch, that was to take all dulce out of the utile, we have had the wonderful works of Sir Walter Scott, the criticism of Hazlitt, the imagination of Keats, the tragedy and winged philosophy of Shelley, the passion of Byron, the wit and festivity of Moore, tales and novels endless, and Mr. Wordsworth has become a classic, and the Germans have poured forth every species of romance,