ers
who perished in the same manner, the four immediate Progenitors of the
person in whose hearing this is supposed to be spoken, all died in the
Field.--W. W. 1807.

Compare _The Borderers_, act III. l. 56 (vol. i. p. 173)--

They say, Lord Clifford is a savage man. ED.

[H] He was killed at Ferrybridge the day before the battle of
Towton.--ED.

1808

The poems referring to Coleorton are all transferred to the year 1807,
and _The Force of Prayer_ was written in that year. Those composed in
1808 were few in number. With the exception of _The White Doe of
Rylstone_--to which additions were made in that year--they include only
the two sonnets _Composed while the Author was engaged in writing a
Tract, occasioned by the Convention of Cintra_, and the fragment on
_George and Sarah Green_. The latter poem Wordsworth gave to De Quincey,
who published it in his "Recollections of Grasmere," which appeared in
_Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_ in September 1839; but it never found a
place in any edition of Wordsworth's own poems. In this edition it is
printed in the appendix to volume viii.

The reasons which have led me to assign _The White Doe of Rylstone_ to
the year 1808, are stated in a note to the poem (see p. 191). I infer
that it was practically finished in April 1808, because Dorothy
Wordsworth, in a letter to Lady Beaumont, dated April 20, 1808, says,
"The poem is to be published. Longman has consented--in spite of the
odium under which my brother labours as a poet--to give him 100 guineas
for 1000 copies, according to his demand." She gives no indication of
the name of the poem referred to. As it must, however, have been one
which was to be published separately, she can only refer to _The White
Doe_ or to _The Excursion_; but the latter poem was not finished in
1808.

It is probable, from the remark made in a subsequent letter to Lady
Beaumont, February 1810, that Wordsworth intended either to add to what
he had written in 1808, or to alter some passages before publication; or
by "completing" the poem, he may have meant simply adding the
Dedication, which was not written till 1815.

All things considered, it seems the best arrangement that the poems of
1808 should begin with _The White Doe of Rylstone_. In the year 1891 I
edited this poem for the Clarendon Press. A few additional details have
come to light since then, and are introduced into the notes. S. T.
Coleridge's criticism of the po