"The name of him who has ravished from thee the dearest treasure of thy
heart, is Roderic. His mother--attend, oh Edwin, for whatever the
incredulous may pretend, the tales related by the bards in their
immortal songs, of ghosts, and fairies, and dire enchantment, are not
vain and fabulous.--You have heard of the inauspicious fame and the bad
eminence of Rodogune. She withdrew from the fields of Clwyd within the
memory of the elder of shepherds. Various were the conjectures
occasioned by her disappearance. Some imagined, that for the haughtiness
of her humour, and the malignity of her disposition, characters that
were wholly unexampled in the pastoral life, she had been carried away
before the period limited by nature to the place of torment by the
goblins of the abyss. Others believed that she concealed herself in the
top of the highest mountain that was near them, and by a commerce with
invisible, malignant beings, still exercised the same gloomy temper in
more potent, and therefore more inauspicious harm. The blight that
overspread the meadows, the destructive contagion that diffused itself
among the flocks, the raging tempest that rooted up the oak, when the
thunder roared among the hills, and the lightning flashed from pole to
pole, they ascribed to the machinations and the sorcery of Rodogune.
Their conjectures indeed were blind, but their notions were not wholly
mistaken.

"Rodogune was the mother of Roderic. She was deeply skilled in those
dark and flagitious arts, which have cast a gloom upon this mortal
scene. The intellectual powers bestowed upon her by the Gods were great
and eminent, and were given for a far different purpose than to be
employed in these sinister pursuits. But all conspicuous talents are
liable, my son, to base perversion; and such was the fate of those of
Rodogune. She delighted in the actions which her dark and criminal