Page:Scotish Descriptive Poems - Leyden (1803).djvu/38

 this edition, contains many large blanks, many cancelled passages, and many rude sketches too incorrect for publication. Many passages, too, have been so enfeebled by expansion, that they have lost the air of originality which they possessed in the early copies. Welsted observes, that "works of originality differ from imitations, as fruits brought to maturity by artificial fires differ from those that are ripened by the natural heat of the sun, and the indulgence of a kindly climate ." The same difference is frequently found between the spontaneous effusions of an author's genius, and those laborious revisals which lose in ease and spirit what they gain in correctness. In Wilson's last manuscript, the expansion of the original is often equally injurious to the correctness of the language, and the curacy of the description. In preparing this edition for the press, the enlarged but incorrect manuscript has been carefully collated with the edition of 1764, and with the manuscript sketch of Nethan; and those various readings have been uniformly selected, which appeared to be most poetical and congruous with the context. This account of the edition offers the best apology for the imperfect or Scotish rhymes which sometimes occur in the poem, the