In Mr. Stanley's modifications of the poem there was, of course, no intention to mislead. Free paraphrasing of foreign works was common enough at the time. Besides, Mr. Stanley provided for the printing of the German text, "which may be had, sewed up with the translation, by such as should be desirous of comparing the one with the other."[1] Yet on the whole, this preface shows, quite as clearly as the poem itself, the spirit of the time immediately before the romantic revival gained its headway.
The preface to Mr. Stanley's first edition is dated Feb. 8, 1796.[2] The advertisement to the third, called a "new edition" is dated April 15 of the same year. Between these two appeared a second edition, a clear indication of considerable popularity. This second edition was an exact duplicate of the first, except for two slight changes on the title-page. There, just before the two verses, appeared the words "By J. T. Stanley,. Esq. F.R.S.," and just after, "Second Edition."[3]
The interest excited by Stanley's translating of the Lenore not only inspired, before its publication, the proposed edition of Wm. R. Spencer to accompany Lady Beauclerk's drawings, but brought out two others. The first, and by far the more important, was the version of William Taylor of Norwich, made some years before as we shall see, and now printed for the first time in the March number of the Monthly Magazine. The second was by Henry James Pye, the poet laureate. This interest also encouraged Stanley's publisher to propose a new edition with better plates, in anticipation of that with the designs of Lady Diana Beauclerk. It is possible also that Mr. Spencer's known purpose to "improve" the translation may have had its influence. At least Mr. Stanley now made his own improvement.
- ↑ This accounts for the heading of the review in the Monthly Mirror, already noticed in footnote to p. 16. After giving the English title it adds, "Lenore, ein Gedicht von Gottfried August Bürger, London, 1796. S. Gosnall." Perhaps, too, this German print was to forestall criticism through comparison with the proposed edition of Mr. Spencer.
- ↑ A curious error regarding this date has led to several misunderstandings. When the third, or new edition was printed in April, the original preface was reprinted but the date was wrongly given as Feb. 8, 1786. This appears in the Harvard library copy at least, and I infer from what follows in all copies. A writer in Fraser's Magazine, LXVIII, 550 (1858), on Bürger and his Translators, first called attention to the date 1786, assumed it to be correct, and spoke of the poem as having been reprinted "ten years later", that is in 1796. As he mentions having the copy before him, we can hardly doubt his having seen the misprinted date. Yet Mr. W. W. Greg, in the Modern Quarterly of Language and Literature, assumed the 1786 of the Fraser's article to be a misreading of 1796, clearly without having examined closely the new edition, unless, indeed, there be some prints in which the wrong date had been corrected.
The error also appears in Gilchrist's Life of Blake (I, 134) where it is said: "In 1795-6 Miller, the publisher of Old Bond Street, employed Blake to illustrate a new edition in quarto of a translation of Bürger's Lenore, by one Mr. J. T. Stanley, F.R S. The first edition (1786) had preceded by ten years Sir Walter Scott's translation which came out at the same time as Stanley's new edition." The latter statement should also read in the same year, not "at the same time", as we shall see. The first date should be 1796. - ↑ This statement is based on a collation of the first edition, lent me by Miss Adeane, and the second edition in the British Museum.
