mine, that I never felt it more difficult to control my emotions, than while listening, or seeming to listen, to my own praise and glory. But, bending my head as if in a posture of attentiveness, and screening my face with my hand, and occasionally using some force to compress the risible muscles, I got through the scene without any misbehaviour, and expressed my thanks, if not in terms of such glowing admiration as she was accustomed to receive from others, and had bestowed upon my unworthy self, yet as well as I could. I passed two days under her roof, and corresponded with her from that time till her death.

Miss Seward had been crippled by having repeatedly injured one of her knee-pans. Time had taken away her bloom and her beauty, but her fine countenance retained its animation, and her eyes could not have been brighter nor more expressive in her youth. Sir Walter Scott says of them, "they were auburn, of the precise shade and hue of her hair. In reciting, or in speaking with animation, they appeared to become darker, and as it were to flash fire. I should have hesitated," he adds, "to state the impression which this peculiarity made upon me at the time, had not my observation been confirmed by that of the first actress on this or any other stage, with whom I lately happened to converse on our deceased friend's expressive powers of countenance."* Sir Walter has not observed that this peculiarity was hereditary. Describing, in one of her earlier letters, a scene with her mother, she says, "I grew so saucy to her, that she looked grave, and took her pinch of snuff, first at one nostril, and then at the other, with swift and angry energy, and her eyes began to grow dark and to flash. 'Tis an odd peculiarity but the balls of my mother's eyes change from brown into black, when she feels either indignation or bodily pain.Ӡ

An officer of her name served as lieutenant in the garrison at Gibraltar during the siege. To his great surprise, . . for he had no introduction which could lead him to expect the honour of such notice,.. he received an invitation to dine with General Elliot. The General asked him if he were related to the author of the Monody on Major André. The Lieutenant replied that he had the honour of being very distantly related to her, but he had not the happiness of her acquaintance. "It is sufficient, Mr. Seward," said the General, "that you bear her name, and a fair reputation, to entitle you to the notice of every soldier who has it in his power to serve and oblige a military brother. You will always find a cover for you at my table, and a sincere welcome; and whenever it may be in my power to serve you essentially, I shall not want the inclination." }

These anecdotes show the estimation in which she was, not undeservedly, held. Her epistolary style was distorted and disfigured by her admiration of Johnson; and in her poetry she set, rather than followed, the brocade fashion of Dr. Darwin. Still there are unquestionable proofs of extraordinary talents and great ability both in her letters and her poems. She was an exemplary daughter, a most affectionate and faithful friend. Sir Walter has estimated, with characteristic skill, her powers of criticism, and her strong prepossessions upon literary points. And believing that the more she was known, the more she would have been esteemed and admired, I bear a willing testimony to her ac

Biographical Preface to the Poetical Works of Anna Seward, p. xxiii.

+ Literary Correspondence. Ib. p. cxxi.

Keswick, Feb. 19. 1838.

Letters of Anna Seward, vol. v. p. 143. Ibid. vol. 1. p. 298.

PREFACE

TO

THE SIXTH VOLUME,

BEING

THE FIRST OF BALLADS AND METRICAL TALES."

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 affect 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

quainted 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 a long literary life, none ever gratified me more than that of Henry Kirke White upon this occasion, when he observed, that if any other known measure had been adopted, the poem would have been deprived of half its beauty, and all its propriety. And when he added, that the author never seemed to inquire how other men would treat a subject, or what might be the fashion of the times, but took that course which his own sense of fitness pointed out, I could not have desired more appropriate commendation.

The same sense of fitness which made me choose for an Arabian tale the simplest and easiest form of verse, induced me to take a different course in an Indian poem. It appeared to me, that here neither the tone of morals, nor the strain of poetry, could be pitched too high; that nothing but moral sublimity could compensate for the extravagance of the fictions, and that all the skill I might possess in the art of poetry was required to counterbalance the disadvantage of a mythology with which few readers were likely to be well acquainted, and which would appear monstrous if its deformities were not kept out of sight. I endeavoured, therefore, to combine the utmost richness of versification with the greatest freedom. The spirit of the poem was Indian, but there was nothing Oriental in the style. I had learnt the language of poetry from our own great masters and the great poets of antiquity.

No poem could have been more deliberately planned, nor more carefully composed. It was commenced at Lisbon on the first of May, 1801, and recommenced in the summer of the same year at Kingsdown, in the same house (endeared to me by many once delightful but now mournful recollections) in which Madoc had been finished, and Thalaba begun. A little was added during the winter of that year in London. It was resumed at Kingsdown in the summer of 1802, and then laid aside till 1806, during which interval Madoc was reconstructed and published. Resuming it then once more, all that had been written was recast at Keswick: there I proceeded with it leisurely, and finished it on the 25th of November, 1809. It is the