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BLIOTHE

LONDON

BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERE,

WHITEFRIARS.

PREFACE.

WHEN the Author was a boy at school, writing twice the number of verses required by the master, and thinking of nothing but poetry and friendship, he used to look at one of the pocket volumes of Cooke's Edition of Gray, Collins, and others, then in course of publication, and fancy that if ever he could produce anything of that sort in that shape, he should consider himself as having attained the happiest end of a human being's existence. The form had become dear to him for the contents, and the reputation seemed proved by the cheapness. He has lived to qualify the opinion not a little, as far as others are concerned in what he does; but in respect to his wishes for his mere self, they are precisely the same as they were then; and when Mr. Moxon proposed to him the present volume, he seemed to realise the object of his life, and to require no other prosperity.

In order, however, not to confound the show of success with the substance, in any greater degree than it might be in his power to avoid, he has taken the opportunity, in this edition of his poems, to evince a proper respect for a chance of their dura

tion beyond the day, by giving them a careful revision, rejecting superfluities, and correcting mistakes of all kinds. To this end he has re-written a considerable portion of the "Story of Rimini," not because he would give up to wholesale objection what has had the good fortune to obtain the regard of the public, but because he wrote it before he visited Italy, had made it in some respects too English, and, above all, had told an imaginary story instead of the real one. The landscapes are now freed from northern inconsistencies; the moral is no longer endangered, as some thought it, by dwelling too much on the metaphysics of a case of conscience; and the story contains the real catastrophe and the spirit of the probable characters of all the parties, without contradicting the known truth by any of the circumstances invented. He is aware of the objections made to altered poems in general, and heartily agrees with them; but the case, as thus stated, becomes, he conceives, an exception to the rule. Dante, who though a very great poet, had a will still greater than his poetry, and was in all things a partisan, was a friend and public agent of the heroine's father, and he has not told the deception that was practised on her. He left it to transpire through the commentators. This point of the story was at no time omitted in the version which the Author, in a fit of youthful confidence, undertook to make from the inimitable original; but, on the other hand, the surprise and murder of the lovers by the husband were converted into a

duel with one, and the remorse of both; and not a word was said of the husband's ferocious character and personal deformity*. These things, if he is not mistaken, make all the difference on the point in question. He has desired to relate the truth in the poem almost ever since he wrote it; the moral objections of the critics increased the desire ; and, indeed, he has long ceased to be of opinion, that an author has a right to misrepresent admitted historical facts. He has often, as a reviewer, had occasion to object to the licence in others. It appears to him the next thing to falsifying a portrait; and possibly even hazards something of that general inconsistency of features, which is observed to result from the painter's misrepresentation of any one of them.

Two additional improvements the Author hopes he has made in this poem. He has delivered it from many weak lines, too carelessly thrown off, and from certain conventionalities of structure, originating in his having had his studies too early directed towards the artificial instead of the natural poets. He had not the luck to possess such a guide in poetry as Keats had in excellent

* A Latin writer, quoted in the “Amori e Rime di Dante Alighieri," p. xcii., says, that he was called Giovanni the Hip-broken (Sciancato), adding, that, though he was deformed in body, he had a daring and ferocious mind :-" Johannes Scancatus, sic denominatus, erat mirè claudus; vir corpore deformis, sed animo audax et ferox." The commentators tell us, that the brother (a very handsome man) was pointed out to Francesca as her future husband, while passing through a square.

Charles Cowden Clarke. The mode of treatment still remains rather material than spiritual. He would venture to prefer, for instance, that of the military procession in "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" to the handling of the same point in the "Story of Rimini." But he could not make alterations to such an extent without writing the whole over again; and though he considers Darwin to have been absurd, when he identified poetry with picture, he regards it as a sin of another extreme against the poet's privilege of universality, to dispute his right to the more tangible imagery of the painter. The descriptions, though long, of that procession, and of the forest, and garden, appear to him to have a certain analogy with the luxury of the South, and at once to heighten and alleviate the catastrophe. If the reader be fatigued with them, he gives himself up to his rebuke. If not, he hopes he shall be defended against more formal objections, on the authority of the critic who said, that every kind of writing was a proper kind," except the tiresome."

The reader of the "Feast of the Poets " will be good enough to bear in mind, that it was first written a long time ago, never contained all the names that had a right to be in it, and therefore still less professes to contain them now. The Author would have written a new one, on purpose to introduce them, especially Mr. Knowles and his brother dramatists; but the truth is, that these are delicate matters for contemporaries to meddle with; and a young writer will find in after years that he had

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