ABSTRACT
First publ. Asolando, 12 Dec. 1889. B. himself, in a letter to Furnivall of I Oct. 1881, referred to its much earlier composition during an explanation of the identity of the dedicatee of Pied Piper, Charles Macready’s young son Willie (see p. 130): ‘He had a talent for drawing, and asked me to give him some little thing to illustrate; so, I made a bit of a poem out of an old account of the Pope’s legate at the Council of Trent—which he made such clever drawings for, that I tried a more picturesque subject, the Piper’ (Trumpeter 27). A letter from Willie Macready thanking B. for Cardinal is undated, but unless B.’s account is very telescoped, the poem was, as Mrs Orr suggests, sent to him just before Pied Piper, i.e. early May 1842 (Life 122); Penguin conjectures 1840, but gives no reason. B.’s sister Sarianna confirms B.’s account, but Kelley and Hudson have established that B. drafted the poem well before this time, and not specifically for Willie Macready’s benefit: ‘his draft of this poem, in the margins of his copy of Nathaniel Wanley’s The Wonders of the Little World… is dated 27 February 1841, well before the illness which is supposed to have prompted composition’ (Correspondence v 330: Willie Macready’s illustrations are reproduced opposite p. 331). Our text is that of the untitled Wanley MS (hereafter 1841). Sir W. Nicholl, in The Bookman lii (1912) 68–9, printed the facsimile of a version of the poem in the handwriting of B.’s father (hereafter Transcript): Kelley and Hudson note that it is close to 1841, and it may be a copy of 1841; alternatively, it may be a copy of the version sent to Willie Macready. In his letter to Furnivall, B. commented: ‘If you care to have the legend of the Legate I am sure you are welcome to it, when I can transcribe it from the page of the old book it remains on’ (ibid.), implying that at that stage 1841 still represented the true text. Another version (hereafter 1889a), much closer to 1889, was sent by B. on an ‘album-leaf to Mrs Thomas on 30 May 1889, with the comment in an accompanying letter: ‘I enclose a little sort of what you may call a childish ballad, hitherto unpublished. Will you offer it for acceptance to the young lady with the best wishes of—shall I say?—hers affectionately as yours most truly’ (ABL MS). The text of 1889 and 1889a is in long lines, composing three stanzas of five, five and four lines (including two extra lines after 11. 8 and 26).
