text:  It would probably have remained there overlooked and incomplete to the day of his death had not the extraordinary popularity of Lord Byron's _Childe Harold_ and subsequent pieces joined to some symptoms of waning public favour in the reception of his own later pieces particularly _Rokeby_ and the _Lord of the Isles_ awakened in his mind as he himself has told us a latent suspicion that he had better retire from the field of poetry before his youthful competitor and betake himself to another career in which hitherto no rival had appeared