Awd Isaac, The Steeple Chase, and Other Poems / With a glossary of the Yorkshire Dialect

TRANSCRIBERS' NOTES
Dialect has been retained. Printer's errors and corrections are described at the end of the text.
WITH A GLOSSARY OF THE
YORKSHIRE DIALECT:
BY JOHN CASTILLO.
WHITBY: PUBLISHED BY HORNE & RICHARDSON.
1843.
The Author of the following Poems prefixes a “Preface” to them, lest he should seem to be wanting in respect to his readers, did he not comply with a custom which is universal. In doing so, however, he would eschew two kinds of Preface, viz: that in which the author arrogates to himself the merit of having produced a work entirely new , both in subject, and in manner of expression, and on that score claims the plaudits of his friends and the public;—and that in which the author professes to feel himself inadequate to the task of composing a book, but at the pressing solicitation of his friends, with great distrust of his abilities for such a work, he yields to their entreaties, and pleads his inability in mitigation of the critic’s wrath. With respect to the former, the writer of the present volume professes not to offer to his readers any thing new , either as to matter, or to language; and as to the latter, the following pieces were most of them composed several years ago, at distant intervals of time, and were frequently perused by his friends long before he had thoughts of publishing them:—the character of his poetry is therefore pretty well known to those who are likely to become purchasers of his book; and it would be but a bungling apology did he attempt to shelter its defects under the plea of inability for his task.
It will be unnecessary to say much of the subjects sung of in the following poems. Though they are various, the author hopes they will all be found to contain a moral, which, if acted upon in common life, would direct the conduct to a beneficial end. Many of them are founded on facts which occurred in the writer’s neighbourhood, and which he has endeavoured to turn to a useful purpose. Others are of an experimental cast, and are the breathings of the poet’s heart when inflamed by Love Divine! It has been his constant aim to exhibit the workings of grace in the heart, its effects on the life, and the glorious futurity to which it conducts its possessor. For this purpose, he has seized on a variety of incidents known to many of his friends, which have furnished him with matter on which to graft a spiritual thought. Life in its spring tide, or when ebbing in death, home with its simple yet hallowed joys, a religious assembly rapt in devotion and love, a landscape endeared by the associations of youth or of kindred, a dilapidated church, a withering flower, a text of scripture—have supplied him with topics;—and he trusts that the doctrines which he has inculcated in connection with them will always be found to agree with the Word of God.