ARGUMENT.
The melancholy appearance, and moody humours of Bertram,
a young man, whose gifts of Nature, rank, and fortune,
seemed calculated to afford every chance of worldly happiness,
having raised the curiosity and excited the inquiries of one, into
whose company he had been thrown, the poet undertakes to
answer the inquirer by a relation of Bertram's life, down to the
period of the fatal catastrophe which embittered the remainder
of his days with inconsolable grief and regret. In the character
chosen to be the object of this calamity, the author has endeavoured
to shew the conflict between a firm friendship and the
most idolatrous love, under the control of a native and inherited
honour and generosity, in a mind of the most romantic cast illumined
by a fervid imagination and trembling with the most
lively sensibility. This gives occasion to fill up the intervals of
the few and simple incidents, which belong to the unhappy
story, with some of those descriptions and sentiments which are
most suited to the poet's intellectual pursuits and pleasures.
