my own damnation. This is
something beyond even heavenly rigour; and so I proceed to
my own destruction, with the proud consciousness that, at all
events, it is my own act. _A propos_, have you ever read the
English acting copy of my "Calaynos"? A viler thing was never
concocted from like materials.

Whether or not the play, "The Bankrupt," preceded or followed
the writing of "Francesca da Rimini" in 1853, we have no way of
determining; but it would seem that it progressed no further in its
stage career than in manuscript form, it being the only play on a
modern theme attempted by Boker. Then, it seems, he was hot on the
trail of the Francesca love story told in Dante, and used by so many
writers in drama and poetry. It is this play, conceded to be his
best, which is included in the present collection, and which calls for
analysis and history by itself.

Taylor's collection of "Poems at Home and Abroad," dedicated to Boker
in 1855, suggests that the two must have continually talked over the
possibilities of gathering their best effusions in book form. Did not
Taylor write, as early as June 30, 1850, "You must come out in the
Fall with a volume of poems. Stoddard will, and so, I think, will I.
You can get a capital volume, with your 'Song', 'Sir John', 'Goblet',
and other things.... The publishing showmen would of course parade our
wonderful qualities, and the snarling critics in the crowd would show
their teeth; but we would be as unmoved as the wax statues of Parkman
and Webster, except that there might now and then be a sly wink
at each other, when nobody was looking." The two friends had been
separated for some time, while Taylor wandered over the face of
the globe, writing from Cairo, in the shadow of the pyramids, and
exclaiming, in Constantinople (July 18, 1852), "There is a touch of
the East in your nature, George."

In 1856, Boker prepared his two volumes of "Plays and Poems" for the
press. He had won considerable reputation as a sonneteer, and this was
further increased by the tradition that Daniel Webster had quoted him
at a state dinner in Washington. As yet he was merely a literary
poet, and a literary dramatist whose name is usually linked with that
Philadelphia group discussed in Vol. II of this collection.[A]

Writing of the Philadelphia of 1868, Leland says:

[It was] "the Philadelphia when 'Emily Schaumbeg' was the belle and
Penington's 'store' was the haunt of the booklover, w