These verses were written for a Benefit at the Dublin Theatre, and were
spoken by Miss Smith, with a degree of success, which they owed solely to
her admirable manner of reciting them. I wrote them in haste; and it very
rarely happens that poetry which has cost but little labor to the writer
is productive of any great pleasure to the reader. Under this impression,
I certainly should not have published them if they had not found their way
into some of the newspapers with such an addition of errors to their own
original stock, that I thought it but fair to limit their responsibility
to those faults alone which really belong to them.
With respect to the title which I have invented for this Poem, I feel even
more than the scruples of the Emperor Tiberius, when he humbly asked
pardon of the Roman Senate for using "the outlandish term, _monopoly_."
But the truth is, having written the Poem with the sole view of serving a
Benefit, I thought that an unintelligible word of this kind would not be
without its attraction for the multitude, with whom, "If 'tis not sense,
at least 'tis Greek." To some of my readers, however, it may not be
superfluous to say, that by "Melologue," I mean that mixture of recitation
of music, which is frequently adopted in the performance of Collins's Ode
on the Passions, and of which the most striking example I can remember is
the prophetic speech of Joad in the Athalie of Racine.