“In 1798 Lewis announced to [Walter] Scott his plan to publish a collection of ‘Tales of Terror’, adding that ‘a Ghost or a Witch is a sine-qua-non ingredient in all the dishes, of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin repast’ (Peck, 118). […] The collection appeared in late 1800 or early 1801 as Tales of Wonder, and, in addition to traditional material and nine original poems by Lewis (the best being ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine’), included five ballads by Scott, eight by Robert Southey, and one by John Leyden. Lewis’s original poems display a remarkable variety of metrical feet, stanzaic form, and rhyme scheme, confirming Walter Scott’s comment that Lewis ‘had the finest ear for the rhythm of verse I have ever heard—finer than Byron’s’ (ibid., 123). Eight were Lewis’s translations from the German, including five from Herder’s Volkslieder, the main faults of which are over adornment and sentimentality. Of the sixty pieces included, about two-thirds had been published before in collections by Thomas Percy, David Herd, and other eighteenth-century compilers, a fact which contributed to the book’s poor public reception and its popular appellation ‘Tales of Plunder’.” (ODNB)
With the bookplate of the Stanley family to front pastedowns, and ownership inscriptions of Charlotte M. Stanley and to fly leafs. A very good copy, rebacked with original spine laid down. .
