Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by

EPES SARGENT,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.

NOTE TO THE SIXTH EDITION REVISED.

SINCE the first publication of this volume, with the foregoing advertisement, LAMIA has been inserted in the collection of Hood's Works, edited by his son, with the following note, which we will preface by stating that the MS. was sent to Mr. Jerdan by Mrs. Hood shortly after her husband's death, and is supposed to have been a production of the year 1828.

[This subject was probably suggested to my father by the poem of Keats's-who was an intimate friend of my mother's family. (I possess one or two unpublished poems of his, and a letter to my mother, into which he had copied the lines from the "Endymion,” commencing “O Sorrow!") It is probable that the talking over of literary matters between my father and Keats, led to the writing of this fragment. I append the extract from " Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy," forming the note to Keats's poem.

"Philostratus, in his fourth book de Vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance in his kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man twenty-five years of age, that, going betwixt Cenchreas and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house, in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she, being fair and lovely, would die with him that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius; who by some probable conjectures found her out to be a serpenta Lamia; and that all her furniture was, like a Tantalus' gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusions. When she saw herself described she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant. Many thousands took notice of this fact; for it was done in the midst of Greece."-Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, part 3, sec. 2, memb. 1, subs. 1.]