HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE MOST EMINENT BRITISH POETS. BY WILLIAM HOWITT. WITH FORTY ILLUSTRATIONS. "An indissoluble sign of their existence has stamped itself on the abodes of all "Every reader turns with pleasure to those passages of Horace, Pope, and Boileau, THIRD EDITION. LONDON: GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & CO., FARRINGDON STREET. NEW YORK: 18, BEEKMAN STREET. MDCCCLVII. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. THE present edition of this work has been delayed by the author's absence abroad for some years, and by other causes which need not be detailed here. It has now been carefully revised, and enriched with much new matter. Indeed, nothing is so striking as the alterations which this interval has necessitated—the ravages which death has made in the ranks of our great poets since the last edition was issued. Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Wilson, Montgomery, Elliott, Joanna Baillie, Caroline Bowles Southey, and Rogers, have since then disappeared from the scene. In Rogers, was snapped the link which bound living authors to a long-past period. He tells us himself that he could remember seeing one of the heads of the rebels of 1745 still remaining on Temple Bar. He had seen Garrick act; he was cotemporary with Johnson and Boswell, Gibbon, Cowper, Horace Walpole, Howard the philanthropist; and saw General Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, who said he had shot snipes in Conduit Street. He had associated with Mrs. Piozzi; heard Sir Joshua Reynolds iv PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. deliver a lecture at the Royal Academy, and Burke and Sheridan's speeches on the trial of Warren Hastings; sent his poems to Mason; knew people who had been familiar with Pope and Gray; had dined at La Fayette's with Rochefoucauld and Condorcet; been introduced to Robertson, Adam Smith, old Henry Mackenzie; saw Lord North in the House; was, he says, within thirty miles of Dumfries when Burns was living there; was acquainted with Porson, Dr. Parr, Helen Maria Williams, Kosciusko, Madame de Genlis, Lord Erskine, Lord Monboddo, Fox, to whom he introduced Wordsworth, Pitt, Windham, Madame d'Arblay, Wilkes, Horne Tooke, &c.; and saw the body of John Wesley laid in full canonicals on a table in his chapel, in the City Road: and yet was but the other day, as it were, living in the midst of this generation, as if he belonged to it. The removal of this one man seems to have pushed the people of his early days now far from us. No such change can occur again in our time, rapid and strange as are the shifting scenes of human life. May the few living men of genius who are yet included in this volume long remain amongst us, land-marks of the past, watching the dawning glories of the future! |