PREFACE.

THE present collection of poems, with perhaps a solitary exception, consists, according to its title, entirely of pieces relating to past events, and a large majority of them are cast in what is, whether rightly or wrongly, familiarly known as the ballad style. The employment of a form, which has been lately made the subject of much criticism, may demand some prefatory remarks.

It can hardly now be matter of doubt, that the present age may fairly claim to itself a superiority over all that have preceded it, in at least one branch of study, that, namely, of history in all its forms,-from the highest philosophical speculations to the minutest antiquarian research. Nor can it well be a mere accidental

coincidence, that in an age thus devoted to the study of past time, its poetry should to so great an extent have reverted to the earliest and simplest form,-so that in a condition of society the most conventional and the farthest removed from the inartificial cast of thought of earlier generations, its poetry is, in great measure, presented in the form of historical ballads, or narratives embodying, much after the manner of the earlier types, any striking event or scene, the outward action of which is presented with more or less of vividness, without any minuter analysis of inward feelings.

This reproduction of an old form of poetry has by some been ascribed to a want of originality, -on the ground that ballad poetry, as being the fittest vehicle for the expression of the mind of a rude and unreasoning age, is on that very account the kind which most admits of imitation, as it furnishes a collection of phrases applicable to almost every circumstance, and an appropriate expression for every feeling so far as it is evidenced by outward gesture, this external por