but I remember that Sigismunda is not married by him to Guiscard (the names are different in Boccace in both tales, I believe—­certainly in Theodore, &c.).  I think Dryden has much injured the story by the marriage, and degraded Sigismunda’s character by it.  He has also, to the best of my remembrance, degraded her still more, by making her love absolute sensuality and appetite; Dryden had no other notion of the passion.  With all these defects, and they are very gross ones, it is a noble poem.  Guiscard’s answer, when first reproached by Tancred, is noble in Boccace—­nothing but this:  Amor puo molto piu che ne voi ne io possiamo.  This, Dryden has spoiled.  He says first very well, ‘the faults of love by love are justified,’ and then come four lines of miserable rant, quite a la Maximin.

TO LADY BEAUMONT

The destiny of his poems

Coleorton, 21 May, 1807.

MY DEAR LADY BEAUMONT,

Though I am to see you so soon, I cannot but write a word or two, to thank you for the interest you take in my poems, as evinced by your solicitude about their immediate reception.  I write partly to thank you for this, and to express the pleasure it has given me, and partly to remove any uneasiness from your mind which the disappointments you sometimes meet with, in this labour of love, may occasion.  I see that you have many battles to fight for me—­more than, in the ardour and confidence of your pure and elevated mind, you had ever thought of being summoned to; but be assured that this opposition is nothing more than what I distinctly foresaw that you and my other friends would have to encounter.  I say this, not to give myself credit for an eye of prophecy, but to allay any vexatious thoughts on my account which this opposition may have produced in you.

It is impossible that any expectations can be lower than mine concerning the immediate effect of this little work upon what is called the public.  I do not here take into consideration the envy and malevolence, and all the bad passions which always stand in the way of a work of any merit from a living poet; but merely think of the pure, absolute, honest ignorance in which all worldlings of every rank and situation must be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings and images on which the life of my poems depends.  The things which I have taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, on foot or in carriage; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election or the borough of Honiton?  In a word—­for I cannot stop to make my way through the hurry of images that present themselves to me—­what have they to do with the endless talking about things nobody cares anything for except as far as their own vanity is concerned, and this with persons they care nothing for but as their vanity or selfishness is concerned?—­what have they to do (to say all at once) with a life without love?  In such a life there can be no thought; for we have no thought (save thoughts of pain) but as far as we have love and admiration.