the faculty of writing well. The lyrical ballads, jacobinical and puling with affectation of simplicity as they were, had undoubtedly a certain merit[1]: and Wordsworth, though occasionally a writer for the nursery-masters and misses,
‘Who took their little porringer,
And ate their porridge there,’
now and then expressed ideas worth imitating; but, like brother Southey, he had his price; and since he is turned tax-gatherer, is only fit to rhyme about lasses and waggoners. Shelley repeated to me the other day a stanza from ‘Peter Bell’ that I thought inimitably good. It is the rumination 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?
- ↑ “Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who then
“Season’d his pedlar poems with democracy.”
Don Juan, Canto III. Stanza 93.
2 B
