PAGES Introduction by Henry Morley ix–xii The Vision of Don Roderick 133–167 The Field of Waterloo 168–183 The Dance of Death 184–188 Romance of Dunois 189–190 The Troubadour 190–191 Pibroch of Donald Dhu 191–192
“_Quid dignum memorare tuis_, _Hispania_, _terris_, _Vox humana valet_!”—CLAUDIAN.
Since there is room in this volume for more verses than Colonel Hay’s { 9}, I have added to them a few poems by Sir Walter Scott; the first written in 1811 at the time of the struggle with Napoleon in the Peninsula, the second in 1815, after Waterloo. Thus there is over all this volume a thin haze of battle through which we see only the finer feelings and the nobler hopes of man. The day is to come when war shall be no more, but wars have been and may again be necessary to bring on that day; and it is of such war, not untinged with the light of heaven, that we have passing shadows in this little book.
“The Vision of Don Roderick; a Poem, by Walter Scott, Esq.,” was printed at Edinburgh by James Ballantyne & Co. in 1811. They are the present representatives of that firm by whom it is here reprinted. It was originally inscribed “to John Whitmore, Esq., and to the Committee of Subscribers for relief of the Portuguese Sufferers, in which he presides,” as a “poem composed for the benefit of the Fund under their management.”
The Legend of Don Roderick will be given in the next volume of our “Companion Poets,” for Robert Southey founded upon it a Romantic Tale in Verse, which is one of the best tales of the kind in the English language. Southey’s tale of Roderick himself was written at the same time when Walter Savage Landor was writing a play upon the subject, and Scott was, in the piece here reprinted, making it the starting-point of a vision of the war in the Peninsula. The fatal palace of Don Roderick may have been a fable connected with the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. The fable, as translated by Scott from a Spanish History of King Roderick, was this:—