PREFACE

As there is little, in all I have been able to collect respecting MARIE,
which has any thing to do with the Poem, I have chosen to place such
information at the end of the book, in form of an Appendix, rather than
here; where the only things necessary to state are, that she was an
Anglo-Norman Minstrel of the thirteenth century; and as she lived at the
time of our losing Normandy, I have connected her history with that
event: that the young king who sees her in his progress through his
foreign possessions is our Henry III.; and the Earl William who steps
forward to speak in her favour is William Longsword, brother to Richard
Coeur de Lion. Perhaps there is no record of minstrels being called upon
to sing at a feast in celebration of a victory which involves their own
greatest possible misfortune; but such an incident is not of improbable
occurrence. It is likely, also, that a woman, said to be more learned,
accomplished, and pleasing, than was usually the case with those of her
profession, might have a father, who, with the ardour, the disobedience,
the remorse of his heroic master, had been, like him, a crusader and a
captive; and in the after solitude of self-inflicted penitence, full of
romantic and mournful recollections, fostered in the mind of his
daughter, by nature embued with a portion of his own impassioned
feelings, every tendency to that wild and poetical turn of thought which
qualified her for a minstrel; and, after his death, induced her to
become one.

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