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me

with Wordsworth physic even to nau

sea; and I do remember then reading some "things of his with pleasure. He had once "a feeling of Nature, which he carried al"most to a deification of it:--that's why Shelley liked his poetry.

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"It is satisfactory to reflect, that where 66 a man becomes a hireling and loses his "mental independence, he loses also the fa

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culty of writing well. The lyrical ballads,

jacobinical and puling with affectation of

simplicity as they were, had undoubtedly

a certain merit*: and Wordsworth, though "occasionally a writer for the nursery mas"ters and misses,

"Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who

then

Season'd his pedlar poems with democracy."

Don Juan, Canto III. Stanza 93.

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Who took their little porringer,

And ate their porridge there,'

now and then expressed ideas worth imi

tating; but, like brother Southey, he had "his price; and since he is turned tax-ga"therer, is only fit to rhyme about asses and

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waggoners. Shelley repeated to me the "other day a stanza from 'Peter Bell' that "I thought inimitably good. It is the ru"mination of Peter's ass, who gets into a "brook, and sees reflected there a family "circle, or tea-party. But you shall have "it in his own words:

Is it a party in a parlour,

Cramm'd just as you on earth are cramm'd?
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,

And every one, as you may see,

All silent and all d-d!'

"There was a time when he would have

"written better; but perhaps Peter thinks

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feelingly.

"The republican trio, when they began "to publish in common, were to have had a "community of all things, like the ancient "Britons; to have lived in a state of nature, "like savages, and peopled some 'island of "the blest with children in common, like A very pretty Arcadian notion !

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"It amuses me much to compare the Bo

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tany Bay Eclogues, the Panegyric of "Martin the Regicide, and Wat Tyler,' “with the Laureate Odes, and Peter's Eu

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logium on the Field of Waterloo. There "is something more than rhyme in that "noted stanza containing

'Carnage is God's daughter!' *-

* Wordsworth's Thanksgiving Ode.

"I offended the par nobile mortally-past "all hope of forgiveness-many years ago. "I met, at the Cumberland Lakes, Hogg "the Ettrick Shepherd, who had just been "writing The Poetic Mirror,' a work that ❝contains imitations of all the living poets'

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styles, after the manner of the 'Rejected "Addresses.' The burlesque is well done,

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particularly that of me, but not equal to "Horace Smith's. I was pleased with

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Hogg; and he wrote me a very witty let

ter, to which I sent him, I suspect, a very

"dull reply. Certain it is that I did not 66 spare the Lakists in it; and he told me he "could not resist the temptation, and had "shewn it to the fraternity. It was too

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tempting; and as I could never keep a "secret of my own, as you know, much less "that of other people, I could not blame "him. I remember saying, among other

"things, that the Lake poets were such "fools as not to fish in their own waters;

"but this was the least offensive part of the epistle."

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"Bowles is one of the same little order of "spirits, who has been fussily fishing on for

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fame, and is equally waspish and jealous. "What could Coleridge mean by praising "his poetry as he does?

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"It was a mistake of mine, about his

making the woods of Madeira tremble, "&c.; but it seems that I might have told

"him that there were no woods to make "tremble with kisses, which would have "been quite as great a blunder,

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"I met Bowles once at Rogers's, and

thought him a pleasant, gentlemanly man

-a good fellow, for a parson, When

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