PREFACE. WHETHER, if I had not been encouraged by some proofs of public favour, I should have written the Poem now before the reader, is a question which I cannot positively determine; but I will venture to assert, that I should not, in that case, have committed the work to the press; I should not have allowed my own opinion of it to have led me into further disappointment, against the voice of judges impartial and indifferent, from whose sentence it had been fruitless to appeal: the success of a late publication, therefore, may be fairly assigned, as the principal cause for the appearance of this. When the ensuing LETTERS were so far written, that I could form an opinion of them, and when I began to conceive that they might not be unacceptable to the public, I felt myself prompted by duty, as well as interest, to put them to the press; I considered myself bound, by gratitude for the favourable treatment I had already received, to show that I was not unmindful of it; and, however this might be mixed with other motives, it operated with considerable force upon my mind, acting as a sti mulus to exertions naturally tardy, and to expectations easily checked. It must nevertheless be acknowledged, that, although such favourable opinion had been formed, I was not able, with the requisite impartiality, to determine the comparative value of an unpublished manuscript, and a work sent into the world. Books, like children, when established, have doubtless our parental affection and good wishes; we rejoice to hear that they are doing well, and are received and respected in good company; but it is to manuscripts in the study, as to children in the nursery, that our care, our anxiety, and our tenderness are principally directed they are fondled as our endearing companions; their faults are corrected with the lenity of partial love, and their good parts are exaggerated by the strength of parental imagination; nor is it easy even for the more cool and reasonable among parents, thus circumstanced, to decide upon the comparative merits of their offspring, whether they be children of the bed, or issue of the brain. But, however favourable my own opinion may have been, or may still be, I could not venture to commit so long a Poem to the press without some endeavour to obtain the more valuable opinion of less partial judges: at the same time, I am willing to confess that I have lost some portion of the timidity once so painful, and that I am encouraged to take upon myself the decision of various points, which heretofore I entreated my friends to decide. Those friends were then my council, whose opinion I was implicitly to follow; they are now advisers, whose ideas I am at liberty to reject. This will not, I hope, seem like arrogance: it would be more safe, it would be more pleasant, still to have that reliance on the judgment of others; but it cannot always be obtained: nor are they, however friendly disposed, ever ready to lend a helping hand to him whom they consider as one who ought by this time to have cast away the timidity of inexperience, and to have acquired the courage that would enable him to decide for himself. When it is confessed that I have less assistance from my friends, and that the appearance of this work is, in a great measure, occasioned by the success of a former; some readers will, I fear, entertain the opinion that the book before them was written in haste, and published without due examination and revisal: should this opinion be formed, there will doubtless occur many faults which may appear as originating in neglect: Now, readers are, I believe, disposed to treat with more than common severity those writers who have been led into presumption by the approbation bestowed on their diffidence, and into idleness and unconcern by the praises given to their attention. I am therefore even anxious it should be generally known that sufficient time and application were bestowed upon this work, and by this I mean that no material alteration would be effected by delay: it is true that this confession removes one plea for the errors of the book, want of time; but, in my opinion, there is not much consolation to be drawn by reasonable minds from this resource: if a work fails, it appears to be poor satisfaction when it is observed, that, if the author had taken more care, the event had been less disgraceful. When the reader enters into the Poem, he will find the author retired from view, and an imaginary personage brought forward to describe his Borough for him to him it seemed convenient to speak in the first person: but the inhabitant of a village, in the centre of the kingdom, could not appear in the character of a residing burgess in a large sea-port; and when, with this point, was considered what relations were to be given, what manners delineated, and what situations described, no method appeared to be so convenient as that of borrowing the assistance of an ideal friend: by this means the reader is in some degree kept from view of any particular place, nor will he perhaps be so likely to determine where those persons reside, and what their connections, who are so intimately know to this man of straw. (1) From the title of this Poem, some persons will, I fear expect a political satire, an attack upon (1) [An intimate personal friend of Mr. Crabbe says:-"Nevertheless, the general description of the Borough is evidently that of Aldborough magnified-nay, by the poet's own confession it is so : 'At her old house, her dress, her air the same, I see mine ancient letter-loving dame: If critics pardon what my friends approved, Can I mine ancient widow pass unmoved? Shall I not think what pains the matron took, When first I trembled o'er the gilded book,' &c. - Let. 18. "Still is the imaginary town a vast enlargement of the real one, containing little more than a thousand inhabitants, and having neither hospital, nor alms-house, nor clubs; and, till lately, neither sects nor schools."] corrupt principles in a general view, or upon the customs and manners of some particular place; of these they will find nothing satirised, nothing related. It may be that graver readers would have preferred a more historical account of so considerable a Borough - its charter privileges, trade, public structures, and subjects of this kind; but I have an apology for the omission of these things, in the difficulty of describing them, and in the utter repugnancy which subsists between the studies and objects of topography and poetry. (1) What I thought (1) On this dictum there is a-pretty paragraph or two in "The Doctor :" -"The poet Crabbe has said that there subsists an utter repugnancy between the studies of topography and poetry. He must have intended by topography, when he said so, the mere definition of boundaries and specification of landmarks, such as are given in the advertisement of an estate for sale; and boys in certain parts of the country are taught to bear in mind by a remembrance in tail, when the bounds of a parish are walked by the local authorities. Such topography, indeed, bears as little relation to poetry as a map or chart to a picture. But if he had any wider meaning, it is evident, by the number of topographical poems, good, bad, and indifferent, with which our language abounds, that Mr. Crabbe's predecessors in verse, and his contemporaries also, have differed greatly from him in opinion upon this point. The Polyolbion, notwithstanding its common-place personifications and its inartificial transitions, which are as abrupt as those in the Metamorphoses or Fasti, and not so graceful, is, nevertheless, a work as much to be valued by the students and lovers of English literature, as by the writers of local history. Drayton himself, whose great talents were deservedly esteemed by the ablest of his contemporaries in the richest age of English poetry, thought he could not be more worthily employed than in what he calls the herculean task of this topographical poem; and in that belief he was encouraged by his friend and commentator Selden, to whose name the epithet of learned was, in old times, always and deservedly affixed. With how becoming a sense of its dignity and variety the poet entered upon his subject, these lines may show: 'Thou powerful god of flames, in verse divinely great, THE DOCTOR, 1834.] |