Satire's View of Sentimentalism 167 Less influential criticism of Southey, but hardly less interesting, is Dermody's satire in More Wonders! where, after accusing Lewis of plagiarizing at the expense of several poets, Dryden, Gray, Bishop Percy, Burns, and Southey, he declares: no pen of mine Had pour'd the stricture of one sober line, If Southey only felt thy plundering rage, If only Southey's ballads deck'd thy page: Congenial Southey, who has made poor Joan, As though in travail, through his volume groan, And set so oft all necromancy loose, Glorious competitor of Mother Goose. 27 Southey's name was definitely linked with that of Words- worth by at least two satirists before 1809. In The Epics of the Ton (1807), Lady Anne Hamilton wrote these lines: Then still might Southey sing his crazy Joan, Or feign a Welshman o'er th' Atlantic flown, Or tell of Thalaba the wondrous matter, Or with clown Wordsworth chatter, chatter, chatter. And she appended to this passage notes about the two unfor- tunates. Of Southey she said: This man, the Blackmore of the age, if we look at the number of his Epics, might become the Dryden, if his fancy were chastened by judgment, and his taste cleansed from the maggots of the new school. 27 The Harp of Erin, 118. Interesting in comparison is The Old Hag in the Red Cloak . . . (London, 1801) a rollicking ballad at the expense of Lewis; the tale is of how his literary ancestor Mother Goose visited him and took vengeance upon him for a minor slight by sending back to limbo all the ghosts and hobgoblins and horrible shapes which were his literary stock in trade. "While as fast as away Matty's progeny flew, Mother Goose summon'd up her original crew, Who with loud peals of laughter and sallies of fun, Qui^i'd, pinch'd, and tormented her reprobate son. " Soon Lewis cried for mercy: "As now you behold me in penitence sunk, Take all my Romances, nay, take too my Monk; But leave me, since thus I acknowledge my crime,
My epilogues, sonnets, and lady-like rhyme. "
