Volume 3 — PROEM.

I am conscious that the presenting again to my readers, in a different form, a story which was long since beautifully told, demands apology. I intreat them to suffer my avowed inducements to form that apology.

The fine touches of pathos, of horror, and of vivid picture, which, more than half a century back, the late Vincent Bourne added in his Latin Paraphrase of William and Margaret, constitute those inducements.

Every poet, of genius equal to that of him whose compositions he is paraphrasing in another language, will, if he scorn the pedant chains of attempted literality, improve upon his original, at least, as often as, from certain verbal and intransfusible felicities, he may be found inferior.

The Latin Paraphrase is, perhaps, in this instance, a better, and certainly a grander poem, than that on which it was built; and it has also a different complexion. Simplicity and mournful tenderness form the character of the Ballad; more of sublime and thrilling horror is mingled with the pathos of the Latin version. Sublimity so intrinsic, from its not depending upon any particular verbal arrangement, but resulting from the idea or the image entirely, will not necessarily lose its spirit by passing into another language.

Venturing to re-paraphrase this aweful vision, I think the fuller sweep of verse in the ten feet elegiacs better suits its solemn character than the shorter lines in which the English Ballad was written. I am however, conscious, that William and Margaret, long in possession of the public ear, will remain unrivalled with the generality of readers; but I flatter myself that those who feel the higher species of poetry will make a different choice, when they find, in the following Poem, the grand additions of Vincent Bourne given with that spirit which disdains the restraints of close phraseology, and the servile scruple which would reject, even from the author’s own stores, images congenial to the theme, tho’ they may not be found in the sweet original, or in the sublimer Latin Paraphrase. She has translated Bourne with the same freedom with which he translated Mallet;—if, indeed, the whole Ballad be not, as the first verse is known to be, more ancient than Mallet’s time. Certainly it is in a very different style from any other composition of his, and has an air of those earlier periods of English poetry; a resemblance which is very prepossessing to many readers.