The Lay of Marie

It is a poetry book. The union of European and Eastern beauty, in the person of Marie, I have attempted to describe as lovely as possible. The consciousness of noble birth, of injurious depression, and the result of that education which absorbed the whole glowing mind of a highly gifted parent, a mind rich with adventures, with enthusiasm and tenderness, ought to be pourtrayed in her deportment; while the elegance and delicacy which more particularly distinguish the gentlewoman, would naturally be imbibed from a constant early association with a model of what the chivalrous spirit of the age could form, with all its perfections and its faults; in a situation, too, calculated still more to refine such a character; especially with one who was the centre of his affections and regrets, and whom he was so soon to leave unprotected. That, possessing all these advantages, notwithstanding her low station, she should be beloved by, and, on the discovery of her birth, married to a young nobleman, whose high favour with his sovereign would lead him to hope such an offence against the then royal prerogative of directing choice would be deemed a venial one, is, I should think, an admissible supposition.