of English rural life and scenery, and the principal character is Enoch Wray, The Village Patriarch, a blind peasant reduced to straitened circumstances in his old age. NOTE 22, PAGE 168. - The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies contains one hundred and twenty-six stanzas, and represents the Fairies as beseeching Father Time not to destroy them. In the dedicatory letter to Charles Lamb, prefixed to the poem, Hood stated that it was his design 'to celebrate by an allegory that immortality which Shakspeare has conferred on the Fairy mythology by his Midsummer Night's Dream. But for him, those pretty children of our childhood would leave barely their names to our maturer years; they belong to the mites upon the plum, to the bloom of fancy, a thing generally too frail and beautiful to withstand the rude handling of Time. It would have been a pity for such a race to go extinct, even though they were but as the butterflies that hover about the leaves and blossoms of the visible world.' NOTE 23, PAGE 172. -The full title is Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg. A Golden Legend. It is divided into eighteen brief parts separately titled, and contains some nineteen hundred lines. NOTE 24, Page 183. - The full title is Death's Jest Book; or the Fool's Tragedy, and is a tragedy in five acts founded on the story of a Duke of Boleslaus in Münsterberg in Silesia, who was killed by his courtfool in 1377. NOTE 25, PAGE 186.- Torrismond is an unfinished drama, one act alone being completed. NOTE 26, PAGE 189.- The Angel of the World, founded upon one of the legends in the Koran, contains sixty-five stanzas, and relates how The Angel of the World was persuaded by the blandishments of a beautiful woman to drink of the forbidden wine, and under the combined influence of it and passion was tempted to pronounce the Words of Might' which place him until the end of the world in the power of Eblis, the most powerful of the fallen angels. NOTE 27, PAGE 221.— Bothwell consists of six parts, and contains some four thousand lines. It is in the form of a monologue, wherein Bothwell, while confined in the fortress of Malmoe, is represented as reviewing the principal events in the life of Mary from the time of her coronation in 1558 to that of his separation from her at Carberry in 1567. The expressed purpose of the author was partially apologetic for Bothwell. NOTE 28, PAGE 233. The Luggie contains some eleven hundred lines, and receives its name from the Luggie, a small rivulet in the neighborhood of Glasgow, on the banks of which the author was born and lived, and to which the poem itself is nominally an apostrophe. NOTE 29, PAGE 237.· The full title is In the Shadows: a poem in sonnets, and it contains thirty-two different sonnets, which are autobiographical in their nature and were written during Gray's closing days. |