ABSTRACT
In a very circumstantial though short preface, Mr. Coleridge informs us that ‘Christabel’ was written long ago; that consequently all marks of plagiarism which may be discovered in it are only chance-coincidences; and also that the metre of ‘Christabel’, though irregular, still has a ‘method in its madness’, and ‘counts the accents, not the syllables, in each line’. This variation from every former rule of versification is called ‘a new principle’; and the reader is to be reasoned into a belief that a line often syllables is no longer than one of five, if there be no more emphatic syllables (for this is all that the author means by accent) in the one than in the other.
