Page:Posthumous poems (IA posthumousswinb00swin).pdf/20

 broadly disseminated. It is the subject of such famous primitive ballads as "Kemp Owyne" (or "Kempion") and "The Machrel of the Sea." Swinburne is seen here in the act of composing, on this familiar theme, a ballad in which no modern or "elegant" touch should distract a reader from believing that this was the genuine poem which is known to have once existed in connection with Bamborough Castle. The distinction between this design, and that which led Swinburne to compose the more or less pre-Raphaelite ballads of the volume of 1866, does not require emphatic statement.

The Ode to Mazzini was found after Swinburne's death, in an old copy-book, from which many leaves had already been torn, presumably by himself. Perhaps the removal of these loosened a page of the Ode to Mazzini, containing the close of Strophe IV and the whole of Strophe V, for these, unfortunately, have disappeared. From this imperfect text Mr. T. J. Wise privately printed the Ode to Mazzini, in November 1909, in an edition of only twenty copies. In 1916, however, another copy of the MS. was bequeathed by Miss Isabel Swinburne to the British Museum, which, besides giving the missing strophes, supplied several minor corrections. It had the appearance of being copied a good deal later, perhaps in a moment of revived interest about