The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.
This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not enterprising in the matter of books--rarely buy and rarely borrow, and have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life. The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of publications at the back I find “_The Poems of James Clarence Mangan_. Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and calendered paper. Nearly 500 pages. $1.” Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.
As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but one other edition of Mangan’s poems--the German Anthology, published in Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of Mitchel’s edition there have been no verses of Mangan’s published in book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been published in this country.
During the twenty years which have elapsed since first I made the acquaintance of the poems of James Clarence Mangan, I have read much verse and many criticisms of verse, and yet I don’t remember to have seen one line about Mangan in any publication issued in England. I believe two magazine articles have appeared, but I never saw them. Almost during these years, or within a period which does not extend back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers--the Jeffreys and Broughams--are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes up the physician’s art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow.