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The phrase at the time was pinning a lady's tail; but the young Author was then too delicate to use it: and happy it was he did not; for the present nicer age would have thought him as indelicate as Lord Monboddo. However an excellent anecdote related of Mrs. Russel, bedchamber-woman to the late Princess Amelia, which is by many remembered (though not here related) will vindicate the authenticity of what was then the usual phrase to express the adjustment of a most material part of a lady's dress.

What a strange objection is here put into the lady's mouth! she finds fault with the women in Charles the First's time for having only half a waist; when every body knows, that to have no waist at all is the true criterion of female elegance. As to lacing, who now could imitate the Venus de Medicis, or any other fine antique, that admitted so gothic a ligament.

Part of the prophecy seems to have been fulfilled, so far at least as starched ruffs go, though the male (I rather call them so than the masculine) followers of Fashion have found a mode of adding to the size of their own necks not quite so picturesque; and the ladies have, occasionally in their morning dishabilles, condescended to imitate them. As to flounces, they have extended their dominion even to bed curtains and hangings of rooms: this, I suppose, out of charity to the insect tribe, for whom they afford a general and most convenient nidus.

This bold assertion, I take for granted, was made merely on hear-say evidence. Readers at the present time will be best able to judge whether that evidence was founded on truth.

A celebrated opera dancer then in vogue.

I suspect that the young Author now, and before in this epistle, took his idea of female shape and beauty from Fielding's Description of Fanny in his Adventures of Joseph Andrews; an idea, which, compared with what it is now, was in that author as absurd, as in himself.

Though I do not find it on the margin of the original MS. the Author had an eye to Virgil in the peculiar changes the mock lover employs:

Georg. Lib. IV. ver. 440.

This is the second time we meet with this obsolete word, yet it will serve with many others in the Poem to ascertain its exact chronology.

Spleen—another obsolete word. Nerves however obtains still most vehemently, though, perhaps, it may in time give place to spasms, whatever the author of Zoonomia may say of their non-existence.

Here the boy pedant comes again from his Virgil with

—Æn. Lib. I. v. 20.

Whale-bone and brocade equally exploded articles.

This very juvenile imitation of the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton, and that which follows it, were written some time previous to that of the Lycidas. (See Poem I. of this Volume.) A copy of the above was many years ago surreptitiously printed in a magazine, and afterwards inserted in Pearch's Miscellany. On this account, I thought it right to revise and now publish it (1797.) The counterpart to it was, with my assent, first printed in the Cambridge Verses on the Peace of Aix la Chappelle; and stands here as it did formerly.

So called from Olenas, a city in Peloponesus, where, according to Ovid, this flower first grew. The story is told by him in his Fasti. Lib. V. v. 231.

First printed 1797.

Alluding to Musæus and the two foregoing imitations of Milton, which the Author was then composing, but had not quite finished.

It was said, in an advertisement prefixt to the first quarto edition, that, “the following Poem would never have appeared in print, had not an interpolated copy of it, published in a country newspaper, scandalously misrepresented the principles of the Author;” which parody, before the publication of the original, was reprinted in the London Evening Post, and generally supposed to be written by the late Dr. Byrom of Manchester. Very soon after Mr. T. Warton, afterwards Poet Laureat, printed an elegant answer to it, entitled, the Triumph of Isis. But ere this the Author (then young) was convinced that the satire it contained, though mixed as it was with true panegyric, was too severe; he therefore forbore to reprint it in any of the former editions of his Poems. However, as Mr. Warton's Poem has been, with this reprinted in certain Miscellanies, and as the former holds a place in his volume, it it was thought proper here to give it a place.—Certain it is that the spirit of Jacobitism, which had obtained in both our Universities before the year 1745, was far from being quite extinguished in 1748, when this Poem was written. May the more recent spirit of Jacobinism (if now it infects either of them) have a still quicker termination! (re-published 1797).

It was originally entituled an Elegy; but the term is altered as not being written in alternate rhymes, which since Mr. Gray's exquisite Elegy in the Country Church-yard has generally obtained, and seems to be more suited to that species of Poem.

The exquisite humour with which Prior has enlivened the plain tale which he took from Pliny, it is hoped will not be much impaired by the following few alterations, attempted for no other purpose than to elucidate the original story, which it is thought, has not hitherto been perfectly understood; not from any defect in Pliny's narrative (as his last translator, M. Falconet would make us believe), but from the blunder of the old Commentators, and the inattention of the latter to the whole passage. The alterations are printed in italics, and Prior's original lines at the bottom of the respective pages.

Prior.

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P.

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The original of this song is preserved in an old Icelandic Chronicle, called Knytlinga Saga. It was translated by Bartholinus into Latin, and from him into French by M. Mallet in his Introduction al' Histoire de Dannemarc. Vol. II. page 287 of the Northern Antiquities, taken from the above work, gives it in English prose under the title of an Ode of Harold the Valiant. He was a Norwegian Prince in the middle of the eleventh century. See also five pieces of Runic poetry published by Dr. Percy. It was versified with a view of being inserted in an Introduction to a projected Edition of an History of English Poetry (see Memoirs of Gray, last Edit. Vol. IV. p. 143) and was meant so be a specimen of the first Ballad (properly so called) now extant of northern origin.