THE

POETICAL WORKS

OF

BARRY CORNWALL.

VOL. III.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR HENRY COLBURN AND CO.

MDCCCXXII.

ENGLISH

OXFORD

LIBRARY

LONDON:

PRINTED BY J. GREEN, LEICESTER STREET.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THE story of Marcian Colonna' is fictitious; but the catastrophe was suggested by a paper which appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, entitled, 'An Extract from Gosschens's Diary.' My original intention was to paint the fluctuations of a fatalist's mind,-touched with insanity,―alternately raised by kindness and depressed by neglect or severity,―ameliorated by the contemplation of external nature, and generally influenced by the same causes which operate on more healthful temperaments. This intention has been in some measure departed from, and the story gradually took the form in

which it now stands. The incidents were invented yet, it may be as well to state that when the tale was near its completion, I read, in Forsyth's Travels, the account of a Princess Pignatelli, whose misfortunes closely resemble those of the heroine of Marcian Colonna.