Gents Mag 1850 part 1 p.669

Gents Mag 1850 part 1 p.669




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	Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 1 p.669 his twenty-sixth. A congeniality of pursuit soon ripened into intimacy; and in September, 1798, accompanied by Miss Wordsworth, they made a tour in Germany. Wordsworth's next publication was the first volume of his Lyrical Ballads, published in the summer of 1798 by Mr. Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, who purchased the copyright for thirty guineas. It made no way with the public, and Cottle was a loser by the bargain. So little, indeed, was thought of the volume that when Cottle's copyrights were transferred to the Messrs. Longman the Lyrical Ballads was thrown in as a valueless volume in the mercantile idea of the term. The copyright was afterwards returned to Cottle; and by him again transferred to the poet, who lived to see it of real money value in the market of successful publications. Disappointed but not disheartened by the very indifferent success of his Lyrical Ballads, years elapsed before Mr. Wordsworth again appeared as a poet. But he was not idle. He was every year maturing his own principles of poetry, and making good the remark of Coleridge, that to admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. In the very year which witnessed the failure of his Lyrical Ballads, he wrote his Peter Bell - the most strongly condemned of all his poems. The publication of this when his name was better known (for he kept it by him till, he says, "it nearly survived its minority,") brough a shower of contemptuous criticisms on his head. Wordsworth married in the year 1803 Miss Mary Hutchinson of Penrith, and settled among his beloved Lakes - first at Grasmere, and afterwards at Rydal Mount. Southey's subsequent retirement to the same beautiful county and Coleridge's visits to his brother poets originated the name of the Lake School of Poetry - "the school of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes" - by which the opponents of their principles and the admirers of the "Edinburgh Review" distinguished the three great poets whose names have long been and will still continue to be connected. Wordsworth's fame increasing, slowly it is true but securely, he put forth in 1807 two volumes of his poems. They were reviewed by Byron, then a young man of nineteen, and as yet not even a poet in print, in the Monthly Literary Recreations for the August of that year. "The poems before us," says the reviewer, "are by the author of Lyrical Ballads, a collection which has not undeservedly met with a considerable share of public applause. The characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth's muse are, simple and flowing, though occasionally inharmonious verse, strong and sometimes irresistible appeals to the feelings, with unexceptionable sentiments. Though the present work may not equal his former efforts, many of the poems possess a native elegance, natural and unaffected, totally devoid of the tinsel embellishments and abstract hyperboles of several contemporary sonneteers. The Song at the Feasting of Brougham Castle. The Seven Sisters, The Affliction of Margaret ---, of ---, possess all the beauties and few of the defects of this writer. The pieces least worthy of the author are those entitled Moods of My Own Mind. We certainly wish these moods had been less frequent." Such is a sample of Byron's criticism, - and of the criticising indeed till very recently of a large class of people misled by the caustic notices of the Edinburgh Review, the pungent satires of Byron, and the admirable parody of the poet's occasional style contained in the Rejected Addresses. His next publication was The Excursion, dedicated to the Earl of Lonsdale. This was originally intended for the central portion of a poem to be called The Recluse, in which the author proposed to pursue his musings. On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life. The Excursion was printed in quarto in the autumn of 1814. The critics were hard upon it. "This will never do," was the memorable opening of the reviewer in Edinburgh. Men who thought for themselves thought highly of the poem; but few dared to speak out. Jeffrey boasted wherever he went that he had crushed it in its birth. "He crush The Excursion!" said Southey, "Tell him he might as easily crush Skiddaw." What Coleridge often wished, that the first two books of The Excursion had been printed separately, under the name of The Deserted Cottage, was a happy idea, and one, if it had been carried into execution, that would have removed many of the trivial objections made at the time to its unfinished character. While The Excursion was still dividing the critics, Peter Bell appeared, to throw amongst them yet greater differences of opinion. The author was evidently aware that the poem, from the novelty of its construction, and the still greater novelty of its hero, required some protection, and this protection he sought behind the name of Southey, with which, he tells us in the Dedication, his own hand had often appeared "both for good and evil." The deriders of the poet laughed still louder

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