Audley End.
_Winifreda_ (Vol. iii., p. 27.).--LORD BRAYBROOKE has revived a Query which
I instituted above forty years ago (see _Gent.'s Magazine_ for 1808, vol.
lxxviii., Part I. p. 129.). The correspondent, C. K., who replied to my
letter in the same magazine, mentioned the appearance of this song in
Dodsley's _Letters on Taste_ (3rd edition, 1757.) These letters, being
edited by John Gilbert Cooper, doubtless led Aikin, in his collection of
songs, and Park, in his edition of Ritson's _English Songs_, to ascribe it
to Cooper. That writer speaks of it as an "old song," and with such warm
praise, that we may fairly suppose it was not his own production. C. K.
adds, from his own knowledge, that about the middle of the eighteenth
century, he well remembered a Welsh clergyman repeating the lines with
spirit and pathos, and asserting that they were written by a native of
Wales. The name of Winifreda gives countenance to this; and the publication
by David Lewis, in 1726, referred to by Bishop Percy, as that in which it
first {109} appeared, also connects the song with the principality. An
Edinburgh reviewer (vol. xi. p. 37.) says that it is "one of the love
songs" by Stephens (meaning George Steevens), a strange mistake, as the
poem appeared in print ten years before Steevens was born.
I notice this error for the purpose of asking your readers whether many
poems by this clever, witty, and mischievous writer exist, although not, to
use the words of the reviewer, "in a substantive or collective form?" "The
Frantic Lover," referred to in the _Edinburgh Review_, and considered by
his biographer as "superior to any similar production in the English
language," and the verses on Elinor Rummin, are the only two poems of
George Steevens which now occur to me; but two or three others are noticed
in Nichols's _Literary Anecdotes_ as his productions.