¹ Blackwood's Magazine, xxxvii, 702.—It would be interesting to know how many other contemporaries were affected similarly. In her Autobiograbhy (1875), pp. 78–79, Mrs. Fletcher [born 1770] tells how in the summer of 1799 two friends brought her the Lyrical Ballads. “Never shall I forget the charm I found in these poems. It was like a new era in my existence. They were in my waking thoughts day and night. They had to me all the vivid effects of the finest pictures, with the enchantment of the sweetest music, and they did much to tranquillize and strengthen my heart and mind, which bodily indisposition had somewhat weakened. My favourites were the ‘Lines on Tintern Abbey,’ the ‘Lines left on a Yew Tree at Esthwaite Lake,’ ‘The Brothers,’ and ‘Old Michael,’ and I taught my children to recite ‘We are Seven,’ and several others.” [The Brothers and “Old Michael” did not appear until the second edition of 1800.]

² This letter first appeared in Mrs. Gordon's Christopher North (1866), pp. 26 ff., and, most recently, in Elsie Smith's An Estimate of William Wordsworth (1932), pp. 52 ff.

³ “Already, in 1802, I had addressed a letter of fervent admiration to Mr. Wordsworth. I did not send it until the spring of 1803; and, from misdirection, it did not come into his hands for some months. But I had an answer from Mr. Wordsworth before I was eighteen …”: D. Masson, The Collected Writings of T. De Quincey (1890), ii, 59. The first draft of this letter appears in H. A. Eaton's A Diary of T. De Quincey, 1803 (1928), pp. 185 ff.

⁴ “You are young and ingenuous,” ran his reply of July 29, 1803, “and I wrote with a hope of pleasing the young, the ingenuous and the unworldly, above all others; but sorry indeed should I be to stand in the way of the proper influence of other writers. You will know that I allude to the great names of past times, and above all to those of our own country …”: William Knight, Letters of the Wordsworth Family (1907), i, 148.

⁵ In his Preface of 1802 Wordsworth outlines his principal objects: (1) “ to chuse incidents and situations from common life”; (2) “to relate or describe them … in a selection of language really used by men”; (3) “to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination …”; (4) “and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.”* Low and rustic life was generally chosen, he immediately adds, for various reasons, one being “because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”

Though Wilson does not refer to “the certain colouring of the imagination” [which is not included in the Preface of 1800, but is added to that of 1802], he comments enthusiastically upon the other points. Thus he refers, if obliquely, to “the incidents of common life” when he writes, “You have seized upon those feelings that most deeply interest the heart, and that also come within the sphere of common observation,” and, “in all your poems you have adhered strictly to natural feelings, and described what comes within the range of every person's observation.” Again, in contrasting “the flimsy ornaments of language” with “the real feelings of human nature, expressed in simple and forcible language,” he voices the conviction that “your poetry is the language of nature.” He considers “the primary laws of our nature” when he compliments Wordsworth's choice of such emotions as the parental, fraternal, sexual, etc. And finally he discusses at length Wordsworth's connection of the passions of men with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature: “You have … explained … that wonderful effect which the appearances of external nature have upon the mind when in a state of strong feeling” and the “inexpressibly beautiful” idea of “the effect which the qualities of external nature have in forming the human mind.”

^* Later in his Preface Wordsworth defines this last point more clearly when he again points out that his principal purpose is “to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement. But, speaking in language somewhat more appropriate, it is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature” [i.e., “the primary laws of our nature” as appears in what immediately follows.]—Compare Wilson: “But, sir, your merit does not solely consist in delineating the real features of the human mind under those different aspects it assumes, when under the influence of various passions and feelings,” etc.

⁶ Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. by William Knight (1897), i, 125, 127.—According to Knight, the reply was the joint production of Wordsworth and Dorothy: Letters of the Wordsworth Family, iii, 435, note.

⁷ The letter may be found in Knight, iii, 435 ff.; in A. B. Grosart, Prose Works of William Wordsworth (1876), ii, 208 ff.; in N. C. Smith, Wordsworth's Literary Criticism (1905), p. 3 ff.; and in Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851), 1, 194.—In the last work the fact that the letter is addressed to Wilson is not stated.

⁸ D. W. Rannie, Wordsworth and his Circle (1907), p. 231: Wordsworth “defended himself as to the unfortunate Idiot Boy, in words which are an instalment of his theory of poetry.”—G. M. Harper, William Wordsworth. His Life, Works, and Influence (1916), i, 439: “ There is nowhere in Wordsworth's prose writings a plainer expression of his democratic principles than the part of his letter to Wilson which deals with that young man's objections to ‘ The Idiot Boy.‘ It occurs in a passage so weighty with disregarded truth that it should be carefully read. …”

⁹ “The narration in the poem is so rapid and impassioned” that the poet could not find time to add a stanza showing the handsome person of his hero.

¹⁰ More than twenty years later the poet shows a similar sensitiveness. In a letter of November 16, 1824, to Alaric A. Watts, he discusses a critique on his poetry that had appeared in the Leeds Intelligencer: “‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ is apparently no favourite with the person who has transferred the article into the Leeds paper; yet Mr. Crabbe in my hearing said that ‘Everybody must be delighted with that poem.’ The ‘ Idiot Boy’ was a special favourite with the late Mr. Fox, and with the present Mr. Canning. The South American critic quarrels with the ‘ Celandine,’ and no doubt would with the ‘ Daffodils,’ etc.; yet on this last the other day I heard of a most ardent panegyric from a high authority. But these matters are to be decided by principles, and I only mention the above facts to show that there are reasons upon the surface of things for a critic to suspect his own judgment”: A. A. Watts, Alaric Watts. A Narrative of his Life (1884), i, 201.

¹¹ From Farewell to Poesy (London, Fifield, 1910), p. 12.

¹² See Cyrus Reading's Memoir of John Wilson, prefixed to The Poetical Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson and Barry Cornwall (1829), p. vii. William Bates carries over the phrase in his Maclise Portrait Gallery (1883), p. 59.

¹³ Thus entitled by the Gentleman's Magazine for June, 1809, cv, 550, which contains, in “Select Poetry,” a copy of this effusion, “spoken at the Theatre at Oxford, June 18, 1806, for Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize—John Wilson, Magd. Coll.”

¹⁴ It is of interest that Wilson wrote his friend Fleming in 1829, “ In early life I fear that my studies were not such as habituated my mind to the very strictest and closest reasonings; nor perhaps is it the natural bent …”: Mrs. Gordon, p. 321.

¹⁵ Masson, v, 274.—De Quincey in after life proved his own insignificance at Oxford by the fact that he never became acquainted with Wilson there: Masson, ii, 61.

¹⁶ Undoubtedly at the time of his election to the professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1820, the attacks in the London Magazine, as well as the stories circulated against him in Whig publications, gave popularity to all sorts of rumors if they did not originate some of them. I could quote a dozen amusing anecdotes of the “Wilson apocrypha.” Mrs. Gordon, p. 48, admits that her father “had acted along with strolling players, and that there was one company to which he was kind and generous.” His adventures with gypsies, his serving as a waiter in an inn—according to some versions for the sake of pursuing a young lady despite her parents—have been frequently enough recounted. Even William Howitt, in Homes and Haunts of the most eminent British Poets (1847), ii, 441, repeats this last yarn, stating that Wilson's father [who had died when the boy was twelve] journeyed to Wales to persuade his son to leave the inn. Cyrus Redding, who wrote the remarks in the introduction to Galignani's Poetical Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson, and Barry Cornwall, Paris, 1829, gives an orgy of fact and fable on p. viii: the most outré, perhaps, the tale that with fifteen other students in swimming naked, Wilson unsuccessfully attacked seventy laborers in the fields, men and women, who had pelted them. George Gilfillan may have brought comfort to contemporary skeptics when he wrote, “We might recount a hundred floating stories” about Wilson's “very romantic and adventurous” life previous to his settling at Elleray (in 1807), “but were assured a little before his death, upon his own authority, that they were, in general, ‘a pack of lies‘”: A Third Gallery of Portraits (1854), p. 435.

¹⁷ An amusing carrying over of the terms of cock-fighting to critical use occurs in Wilson's Homer and his Translators written some thirty years later: “Hector is here chicken-hearted—cowed—crowed down—cool in the pens—fugy, as cockers say”: Blackwood's Magazine, May, 1831, xxix, 860.

The following reference to game-cocks should clinch Wilson's authorship of the review of Tom Moore's Love of the Angels in the same periodical, January, 1823, xiii, 70:

Farther than this we cannot proceed with our quotations. This is really enough to blind the eyes of a feather-monger. We do not know how an angel feels himself during moulting-time; but we do know, that no other animal with feathers, is at that time at all disposed either for love or war; and that the best game-cock that ever flew, is at that time little fit either to exterminate or continue his species.

^17a Throughout her Christopher North Mrs. Gordon refers to her father's beloved as “the Orphan Maid,” “Margaret,” or “Miss M.” I discovered the girl's real name in some unpublished letters of Wilson's preserved in the National Library of Scotland.

¹⁸ See, for example, his letter to Findlay, dated “Oxford, 1807”: Mrs. Gordon, p. 75.

¹⁹ Mrs. Gordon, p. 60.—So late as 1809 Alexander Blair and he were studying Spanish in preparation for an intended expedition to Spain and Greece with DeQuincey: Mrs. Gordon, p. 98. See also Note 39.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 69.

²¹ Ibid., p. 77.

²² Mrs. Gordon says, p. 81, that her father first met the poet in 1807. Dorothy Wordsworth's first mention of her later friend occurs in a letter to Mrs. Clarkson, March 28, 1808, concerning some orphans named Green, whose parents have recently perished: “The Bishop of Llandaff will subscribe ten guineas, and we have received five guineas from a Mr. Wilson; a very amiable young man, a friend and adorer of William and his verses, who is building a house at Windermere”: Knight, i, 346–347.

²³ Knight, i, 487.—De Quincey, too, twice visited the Lake district from a desire to meet Wordsworth, but on neither occasion could summon courage to make the introduction: “… The very image of Wordsworth, as I prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as before Elijah or St. Paul. …” Masson, ii, 231.

²⁴ In the letter to “Mathetes.”

²⁵ Knight, i, 368–369.

²⁶ Viscount Cranbrook, “Christopher North,” in the National Review (London, W. H. Allen, April, 1884), iii, 156.—(In at least one standard edition of Wordsworth's poems, the date of composition of To The Clouds, as well as the date of publication, is given as 1842.)

²⁷ Ibid., iii, 155–156.

²⁸ Ibid., iii, 155.

²⁹ A. Dyce, Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers (1887), pp. 254–255, note.—Hall Caine retells the anecdote in Cobwebs of Criticism (1883), p. 81.

³⁰ Masson, ii, 432.

³¹ Mrs. Gordon, p. 93.—The same authority, pp. 93–94, notes, gives extracts also from her father's commonplace books at the time, in which occur various curious juxtapositions of the poetical and the oviparous; her anecdote of the old gentleman at church who feared that “the gemm eggs” in his pocket might be crushed, has been claimed for his uncle by William Bell Scott: Autobiographical Notes, ed. by William Minto (1892), 1, 71.

³² Quarterly Review (1863), cxiii, 217.

³³ According to William Litt, author of Wrestliana, etc. (1823), pp. 26, 137, Wilson in 1807 and 1809 temporarily revived wrestling at the Lakes by the offer of a prize of five guineas and a silver-mounted belt.

³⁴ H. D. Rawnsley, Past and Present in the English Lakes (1916), p. 218. The Noctes Ambrosianae of August, 1830, ends with Bob Howies shooting off a brace of pocket-pistols unexpectedly, amid general consternation.

³⁵ S. C. Hall, A Book of Memories (1871), p. 330, note.

³⁶ Wordsworthiana, ed. by William Knight (1889), p. 99. Compare Note 43.

³⁷ Knight, Letters of the Wordsworth Family, i, 433, 473.

³⁸ Ibid., i, 477–478.

³⁹ See “H. A. Page,” De Quincey's Life and Writings (1890), i, 122, for Wilson's letter to the Opium-Eater, September 12, 1809, inviting his company to Spain. “Mr. Wordsworth, who, with his wife, is now staying at Elleray, has strongly recommended me to write you on this subject.” The trip was abandoned, De Quincey tells us, because of Napoleon's “furious and barbarous mode of making war”: Masson, ii. 434. Elsewhere the Opium-Eater outlines the itinerary of the trip (Masson, v, 283), and remarks that he would himself have been willing to venture the journey just to be strung up by the French and thus to show Wilson the depravity of his hero Napoleon (Ibid., v, 284–285).

⁴⁰ Compare, likewise, the following letter, written by Mary Wordsworth to De Quincey on August 20, 1809: “Mrs. Wilson and her daughters, and Miss Jane Penny and Mr. Wilson, were here last week; they came in part to see me, and in part to avail themselves of the privilege which you had given them to use your cottage. After drinking tea at Allan Bank we all repaired to the Town-End, and drank your health in the little parlour …”: Knight, i, 474.

⁴¹ Ibid., i, 465–466.

⁴² Mrs. Gordon, p. 84. The party consisted, she says, of twenty-two persons, besides ten servants.

⁴³ “When they were all on the lake together, Wilson fell backwards into the water, and, of course, since he did not appear again on the surface, there ensued great anxiety and confusion: at last his leonine head discovered itself a long way off, and the boat started in pursuit. His face exhibited some signs of exhaustion and even distress, and before they could quite reach him he slowly sank, and was lost to sight for some seconds. When he next rose he was ever so far off again, and it began to dawn upon Wordsworth that his brother bard was making fun of him. The fact was the Professor could swim and dive like an otter, and took greater pride in the display of his muscular energies than even in his literary powers. The two friends afforded in this, as in many other respects, a very striking contrast. Wilson was personally much the more attractive: a genial, open-handed, and manly fellow, who won the hearts of all the honest dalesmen; nor has his memory failed from among them even now. Wordsworth, whose intellectual endowments were, of course, far superior, had no such secret of ‘getting on’ with his fellow creatures …”: James Payn, The Lakes in Sunshine (1870), p. 89.

For another version, at third hand, of Wilson's prank, see also Mrs. Gordon, pp. 95–96.

⁴⁴ “The following Poem,” runs the Advertisement to the Angler's Tent, “is the narrative of one day, the pleasantest of many pleasant ones, of a little Angling-excursion among the mountains of Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Cumberland. …

“They visited all the wildest and most secluded scenes of the country. On the first Sunday they passed among the hills, their tent was pitched on the banks of Wast-Water, at the head of that wild and solitary lake, which they had reached by the mountain-path that passes Barn-Moor Tarn from Eskdale. Towards evening, the inhabitants of the valley, not exceeding half-a-dozen families, with some too from the neighbouring glens, drawn by the unusual appearance, came to visit the strangers in their tent ….

“The images and feelings of these few happy days, and, above all, of that delightful evening, the author wished to preserve in poetry. What he has written, while it serves to himself and his friends as a record of past happiness, may, he hopes, without impropriety be offered to the public, since, if at all faithful to its subject, it will have some interest to those who delight in the wilder scenes of Nature, and who have studied with respect and love the character of their simple inhabitants”: Poetical Works of Wilson (1874), p. 257.

⁴⁵ Mrs. Gordon, pp. 84–85.—See the third stanza of the Angler's Tent.

⁴⁶ Mrs. Gordon, pp. 87–88.—The whole excerpt should be read.

Later, on pages 116–117, the same authority refers in the commonplace books to the subjects for poetry contemplated by her father, with the proposed character of each. “Red Tarn—melancholy and mournful” is one. Another is “On the death of Gough among the hills—different view of it from W[ordsworth] and Scott.” A dozen years later in Blackwood's Magazine “Christopher North” treated this subject in prose that startled the reader of his time, as it will startle the reader of to-day, most abominably. The ravens of Helvellyn picking out a dead man's eyes, even though that dead man be a Quaker, is better fitted for prose, at any rate, than for poetry.

⁴⁷ Knight, i, 486–487.

⁴⁸ De Quincey: Masson, v, 282.

⁴⁹ See, for example, Wilson's Essays on the Lake School of Poetry, No. II. “On the Habits of Thought inculcated by Wordsworth,” Blackwood's Magazine (December, 1818). De Quincey suggested the signature “Mathetes”: Mrs. Gordon, p. 85.

⁵⁰ What shall youth do in a society where “all which is drawn from the depth of Nature, all which impassioned feeling has made original in thought, would be misplaced and obtrusive” (265), —where “whatever be the native spirit of a mind, it is evident that this perpetual adaptation of itself to others—this watchfulness against its own rising feelings, this studied sympathy with mediocrity—must pollute and impoverish the sources of its strength” (266).—All numbers in this and the note following refer to Coleridge's The Friend, No. 17 (December 14, 1809).

⁵¹ Pp. 266–267.

⁵² Harper, ii, 183.

⁵³ He argues the “inherent superiority of Contemplation to Action” (312)—but by no means “barren contemplation” (312)—when he speaks of “the general superiority of thought to action;— as preceding and governing all action that moves to salutary purposes; and, secondly, as leading to elevation, the absolute possession of the individual mind, and to a consistency or harmony of the Being within itself, which no outward agency can reach to disturb or to impair:— and lastly as producing works of pure science; or of the combined faculties of imagination, feeling, and reason;—works which, both from their independence in their origin upon accident, their nature, their duration, and the wide spread of their influence, are entitled rightly to take place of the noblest and most beneficent deeds of Heroes, Statesmen, Legislators, or Warriors” (312–313).—All numbers in this and the three notes following refer to Coleridge's The Friend, N. 20 (January 4, 1810).

⁵⁴ P. 312.

⁵⁵ P. 313.

⁵⁶ Since Professor Arthur Beatty has shown the importance of the answer to Wordsworth's doctrine of the three ages of man, the portion of the essay dealing with “nature” and “reason,” already treated by Professor Beatty, need not be discussed here. See William Wordsworth: his doctrines and art in their historical relations (1922), p. 82 ff.

(Briefly, quite as important to youth as nature “teaching seriously and sweetly through the affections—melting the heart, and, through that instinct of tenderness, developing the understanding” (311) is reason to manhood: “she gives much spontaneously, but she seeks for more; she works by thought, through feeling; yet in thoughts she begins and ends” (310). Nature and reason together will save young manhood. “Let then the Youth go back, as occasion will permit, to Nature and to Solitude, thus admonished by Reason, and relying upon this newly acquired support” of duty (311).

⁵⁷ A. B. Grosart, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth (1876), iii, 263. (Knight, in his Letters of the Wordsworth Family, curiously, omits the passage quoted, as well as, incidentally, a passage in which Wordsworth says that he twice dined with Wilson at this period. See Knight, ii, 436–7.)

⁵⁸ Knight, i, 492.

⁵⁹ Ibid., i, 503–504, 505–506.

⁶⁰ Reminiscences of Wordsworth among the Peasantry of Westmoreland: Knight's Wordsworthiana, pp. 113–114. Reprinted also in H. D. Rawnsley's Lake Country Sketches (1903), pp. 50–52.—Of later date also is the following reference by Wilson, in after days, to his association with Wordsworth at the Lakes: “We never had in our hands the poems of Anne, Countess of Winchelsea, printed in 1713; but we well remember reading some of them in beautiful manuscript, many years ago, at Rydal Mount”: Blackwood's Magazine, March, 1837, xli, 406.

⁶¹ J. P. Grant, Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan (1844), ii, 148. The loss of his fortune four years after his marriage brought only closer union. “Whatever my anxieties and sorrows are or may be in this life,” Wilson wrote his wife in 1816, “ I have in your affection a happiness paramount to all on earth, and I think I am happier in the frowns of fortune, with that angelic nature, than perhaps even if we had been living in afluence”: Mrs. Gordon, p. 150.—Mrs. Wilson's later admirable skill in letting her husband find opportunity to write in a noisy household “when the fits of incubation were on him” is part of the history of Blackwood's Magazine.

⁶² Masson, v, 286.

⁶³ Mrs. Gordon, p. 109.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 112.

⁶⁵ George Gilfillan uses this phrase, encomiastically, of Wilson's Isle of Palms.—See his Gallery of Literary Portraits (1845), p. 188.

⁶⁶ Blackwood's Magazine (April, 1830), xxvii, 632.

⁶⁷ Thus Mary is in the ballad stanza, has its scene laid “by Grassmere shore,” and deals with the consolation that the beauty of nature brings to a lover whose beloved has perished:

(It may be worth noting that a poem entitled Mary appeared in Wilson's MS. book at Glasgow, 1803: Mrs. Gordon, p. 36, note.,) My Cottage, too, is purely Wordsworthian, or addled only by overdidacticism:

(This piece was composed in the autumn of 1807: Mrs. Gordon, p. 76). Numerous other poems—such as Lines … on Recovery from a Dangerous Illness and Loughrig Tarn—hymn Windermere and the value of nature to the poet. Such pieces, again, as Troutbeck Chapel and Hymn to Spring are straight didactic poems with a natural background. In Peace and Innocence a child carrying a lamb inspires in Wilson a perfervid joy for innocence; in Lines written on seeing a Picture of Berghem, of an Ass in a Storm-Shower, a donkey affords him moral consolation. The blind man in the Picture of a Blind Man is happy despite his affliction:

Fluently, in blank verse for the most part, or, at times, in the heroic couplet, Wilson sings the moral joys of nature, reminding one rather of William Cullen Bryant (concerning whom he printed an excellent essay in April, 1832), than of Wordsworth.

(One poem definitely connects its author with the whole Lake School. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote Mrs. Marshall, September 10, 1800: “Mr. Clarkson is the man who took so much pains about the slave trade. He has a farm at Ullswater, and has built a house. Mrs. C. is a pleasant woman”: Knight, i. 128. Coleridge had won the Greek prize at Cambridge in 1792 with an Ode on the Slave Trade, and had lectured at Bristol in 1795 (admission one shilling) on the subject:

“To-morrow evening, June 16th, 1795, S. T. Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge, will deliver, (by particular desire) a lecture on the Slave Trade, and the duties that result from its continuance”: Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of S. T. Coleridge and Robert Southey (1847), p. 14. In The Watchman of 1796 he treated the subject also: see, for example, No. 3 (March 17), pp. 73, 94; No. 4 (March 25), pp. 100, 122 ff.; and No. 5 (April 2), p. 129 ff.—and his single contribution to the Edinburgh Review, July, 1808, dealt with Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, xii, 355. Southey too wrote several poems on the subject: six sonnets on the slave trade in 1794; To the Genius of Africa, 1795; The Sailor, 1798; Verses spoken in the Theatre at Oxford upon the Installation of Lord Grenville, 1810. Wordsworth addressed a sonnet To Thomas Clarkson, on the Final Passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, March, 1807. The subject even appealed, indirectly, to his sense of humor: in 1822 Clarkson's philanthropic kindness to a negro widow inspired him and Sarah Coleridge to write a parody of Ben Johnson's “Queen and huntress chaste and fair”: “Queen and negress chaste and fair!”: Knight, ii, 189–190. And so in his humanitarian poem, Lines written onr eading Mr. Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Wilson treats vigorously a topic and a person well known to the “Lakers.” The pale-faced band of Englishmen he indignantly describes:

⁶⁸ J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837), ii, 390.

⁶⁹ Edinburgh Review (February, 1812) xix, 376.

⁷⁰ Mrs. Gordon, p. 116.

⁷¹ The Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle. With a sketch of his life, by Leitch Ritchie (1839), p. xxix. Pringle's criticism of the poems, that follows, is a shrewd one.

⁷² The Poems of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. by Brimley Johnson (1906), pp. 143–145.

⁷³ R. E. Prothero, Works of Lord Byron. Letters and Journals (1898–1904), iii, 396.

In Hogg's Poetic Mirror (1816) three poems are attributed to “J. Wilson”: The Morning Star, or the Steam-Boat of Alloa, and The Stranded Ship, in the lilting measure of the Isle of Palms; and Hymn to the Moon, in blank verse. In two other poems, also, by“ W. Wordsworth,” The Flying Tailor and The Stranger, two most clever parodies of Wordsworth's feebler style, Wilson is introduced. Here are a few lines from the latter poem:

⁷⁴ Thus J. T. Coleridge, reviewing Coleridge's Remorse in the Quarterly (April, 1814), xi, 181, couples Wordsworth and Wilson thus:

… “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” says Mr. Wordsworth, in a passage which strikingly exemplifies the power of imaginative poetry; and Mr. Wilson, on seeing an infant asleep, exclaims:

Rarely have two more incongruously unequal poems been thus brought together. (For authorship of the article, see the appendix of W. Graham's Tory Criticism in the Quarterly Review, 1809–1853 (1921).)

⁷⁵ Mrs. Gordon, p. 114.

⁷⁶ Electic Review (January, 1813), xvii, 22.

⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 27.

⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 34.

⁷⁹ Monthly Review, second series (May, 1812), lxviii, 35.

⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 38.—The critic of the Isle of Palms in the Literary Panorama (August, 1812), xii, 215–9, laments that Wilson has copied the weaker element in Scott. The reviewer prefers the Angler's Tent, ten stanzas of which he quotes.

⁸¹ Mrs. Gordon, p. 114.

⁸² Ibid., p. 115.

⁸³ “George Paston,” Side-Lights on the Georgian Period (1902), p. 47.

⁸⁴ Originally I had intended quoting Jeffrey's first two paragraphs entire. But since only recently I have seen Miss Elsie Smith's An Estimate of William Wordsworth (1932), I limit myself to the brief excerpt below.

⁸⁵ Edinburgh Review, xix, 375.

⁸⁶ Perhaps the closing remarks on the Excursion are equally fine. See the Edinburgh Review, xxiv, 29, from “When we look back” to “condemned to pick them.”

⁸⁷ Prince D. S. Mirsky, Pushkin (1926), p. 167.

⁸⁸ Lady Charlotte Bury, The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting ed. by A. Francis Steuart 1908), ii, 260.

⁸⁹ C. C. Southey, Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (1850), iv, 227.

⁹⁰ Reply to Blackwood's Magazine: Prothero, iv, 494. In the same year Byron wrote in his Preface to Marino Faliero: “… Surely there is dramatic power somewhere, where Joanna Baillie, and Milman, and John Wilson exist. The ‘City of the Plague’ and the ‘Fall of Jerusalem’ are full of the best materiel for tragedy that has been seen since Horace Walpole, except passages of Ethwald and De Montfort.”

⁹¹ I have just discovered another exception in the critic of the Literary Panorama, November, 1816, who writes: “In his cast of thought, in his phraseology, and manner, Mr. Wilson has evidently copied our early dramatists …” New Series, v, 243. In 1827, the writer of an article on The Poetry of Professor Wilson, in The Literary Magnet, New Series, iii, 73–84, calls Wilson a disciple of Wordsworth, p. 73, and points out that he follows the Greek dramatists and Wordsworth, “between whom a more striking affinity exists than has generally been suspected …” p. 84.

At the beginning of a critique on Wilson's and Lockhart's novels in Knight's Quarterly Magazine of June-October, 1823, “Edward Haselfoot” (W. S. Walker) perfectly summarizes the general attitude of contemporary reviewers. Wilson, he declares, “is essentially of the Lake School, and more especially a follower of Wordsworth although strong traces of Coleridge are likewise discoverable …,” pp. 18–19. Walker admits he had not the courage to read the City of the Plague when it appeared: “We cannot doubt, however, that it contained a great deal of poetry, and much natural beauty; and, at all events, it was decidedly Wordsworthian …,” p. 19. Italics mine.

⁹² Monthly Review, March, 1817, lxxxii, 244.

⁹³ Ibid., lxxxii, 249.

⁹⁴ Ibid., lxxxii, 250.

⁹⁵ Ibid., lxxxii, 253.

⁹⁶ Scots Magazine, March, 1816, lxxviii, 212.

⁹⁷ In a letter to De Quincey of June, 1829, Wilson writes, “The Plague has been often touched on and alluded to, but never, that I know of, was made the subject of a poem, old Withers [sic] (the City Remembrancer) excepted, and some drivelling of Taylor the Water-Poet. Defoe's fictitious prose narrative I had never read, except an extract or two in Britton's Beauties of England”: Mrs. Gordon, p. 325.

⁹⁸ J. P. Grant, Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan (1844), ii, 148.

⁹⁹ Mrs. Gordon, p. 138.

¹⁰⁰ Edinburgh Review, xxvi, 459–460.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., p. 476.

¹⁰² April 13, 1814.—Quoted in William Knight's Life of William Wordsworth (1889), ii, 213: volume 10 of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by W. Knight. On October 25 of the same year the Diary tells of Robinson's visit at Cambridge: “Dined with Mr. Tillbrook of Peterhouse. He is an admirer of Wordsworth. He says that Wilson, the poet, assured him that Jeffrey, the Edinburgh Reviewer, declared to him that he is a great admirer of Wordsworth; and that he had attacked him, not because he himself thinks lowly of him, but because the public think highly of him. I had heard a similar tale before, but never on such good authority. Jeffrey further asked Wilson to introduce him to Wordsworth, which Wilson refused doing. Wilson and Jeffrey are friends, and the Isle of Palms was sent to him in MS., with an offer to omit anything that might be offensive. It seems strange to me that any sincere admirer and disciple of Wordsworth should suffer such an elevation of himself at his master's expense.,” Ibid., ii, 228.

¹⁰³ May 13, 1812.—Edith J. Morley, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc.—Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson (1922), p. 50. Jeffrey's praise of Wilson at the expense of Wordsworth is not, as a matter of fact, exceptional: in his review of Crabbe's Poems, April, 1808, of Cromek's Religues of Burns, January, 1809, of the British Georgics of James Grahame, April, 1810, the critic drives home his praise for each poet by contrasting his virtues with the defects of Wordsworth—see the Edinburgh Review, xii, 133 ff.; xiii, 276; xvi, 216. See also Jeffrey's review of the Dramatic Works of John Ford (August, 1811), xviii, 283, and Hazlitt's article on Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (August, 1817), xxviii, 495, 507 ff.

¹⁰⁴ Pencillings by the Way, Letter cxxvii: The Complete Works of N. P. Willis (1846), pp. 199, 200.—Willis is a dangerous authority. In the same conversation the American asked, “What is Southey's manner of life?” to which Wilson replied, “Walter Scott said of him, that he lived too much with women. He is secluded in the country, and surrounded by a circle of admiring friends, who glorify every literary project he undertakes, and persuade him, in spite of his natural modesty, that he can do nothing wrong or imperfectly. He has great genius, and is a most estimable man.” Later in the same year Henry Taylor wrote Southey from London, November 5, 1835, of a meeting with Wilson in Edinburgh. “I gave him your message, to the effect that you are still surrounded by women who persuaded you that everything you did was perfect, and he answered that W[illis] lied, and that no such thing hae been said by him, but that W—had himself said something of the sort, as having heard it from some one else …” Correspondence of Henry Taylor, ed. by Edward Dowden (1888), pp. 67–68.

¹⁰⁵ “Killed” is hardly the word, for Wilson wrote verses sporadically after 1817, and indeed in the years following 1829 enjoyed a sort of poetical recrudescence.

¹⁰⁶ National Review (London: Chapman and Hall, July, 1856), iii, 183.

¹⁰⁷ R. Shelton Mackenzie's edition of the Noctes Ambrosianae (1867), i, 374. Wilson summarized himself as a poet, more modestly, a dozen years later, thus: “We at once give up our verses—if you are disposed so to treat them—to your indifference or contempt. Thank heaven! they never have been much read—far less popular; nor could we any more than you recite a dozen of them in the order in which they stand in print, were you to give us a crown. But we are in moderation proud of our prose …” Blackwood's Magazine (January, 1837), xli, 121.

¹⁰⁸ A. H. Japp, De Quincey Memorials (1891), ii, 30–32.—Promptly De Quincey replied, May 11, 1813, “Will £200 be enough?” and at once wrote for that amount to a merchant in Manchester: Ibid., ii, 32–34.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., ii, 36–37.—Both De Quincey and Wordsworth knew the subject, for the Opium-Eater saw the latter's pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra through the press in the spring of 1809.

¹¹⁰ Andrew Lang, Life and Letters of J. G. Lockhart (1897), i, 97–98. In an article in Hogg's Instructor of 1852, De Quincey himself writes: “In the year 1814 it was that I became acquainted with Sir William Hamilton, the present Professor of Logic in the University of Edinburgh. I was then in Edinburgh for the first time, on a visit to Mrs. Wilson, the mother of Professor Wilson”: Masson, v, 308. Compare, also, Masson, ii, 435, and “H. A. Page” [A. H. Japp], De Quincey's Life and Writings (1877), i, 186–187.

¹¹¹ “My recollection is vivid of his brief sojourn in Edinburgh, in 1814. I cannot overlook how, on the day of his arrival, I was kindly invited to meet him, by the late Mrs. Wilson.” Gillies later describes a walk with James Wilson, Mrs. Wordsworth, Miss Hutchinson and the poet, and outlines an interesting discussion on poets, between himself and Wordsworth, which continued during some three hours. Memoirs of a Literary Veteran (1851), ii, 140 and 141–144.

¹¹² James Hogg, Reminiscences of Former Days, prefixed to the first volume [the only one published] of Altrive Tales (1832), cxxiv–cxxvi. The joke about Wordsworth as horse-dealer is told also in Blackwood's Magazine, v, 654, note, where the mistake is attributed not to Hogg but to his friend R[ussell] of Y[arrow].

¹¹³ Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, ii, 184.— Thomas Thomson, verbosely it must be owned, describes some of the “curious doings” when Hogg was at Elleray. See his biography prefixed to his Works ef the Ettrick Shepherd (1865), pp. xxxi–xxxii.—An excellent anecdote of Wordsworth and Hogg appears in Notes and Queries, fifth series, ii, 157–158.

¹¹⁴ Altrive Tales, p. L.

¹¹⁵ De Quincey Memorials, ii, 38.

¹¹⁶ The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (1838): Preface to Volume nine, p. xvi.

¹¹⁷ Altrive Tales, p. cxxii.

¹¹⁸ Ibid., pp. cxxvii–cxxix. Compare Robert Chambers, The Book of Days (1863), i, 477. Though, says Lockhart, Wordsworth “ took mighty offence” at this story's being “blabbed in print,” he yet mentioned Hogg in kindly fashion in August, 1825. See Familiar Letters of Sir W. Scott (1894), ii, 342. As for Hogg, despite his wrath he appears to have been quite ready to accept in November, 1814, Wordsworth's Yarrow Visited for his proposed Poetic Mirror, as Wordsworth's letter to R. P. Gillies, November 12, 1814 shows: “We think it [Yarrow Visited] heavier than my things generally are, and nothing but a wish to show to Mr. Hogg that my inclinations towards him and his proposed work were favourable, could have induced me to part with it in that state.” (Wordsworth's various references to the Shepherd in his correspondence with R. P. Gillies are of interest. Thus in the letter of November 12, 1814, he wishes to be remembered to Hogg as well as to the Wilsons. In a letter of November 23 he praises the Queen's Wake despite its “false finery” of style. “Mr. Hogg,” runs a letter of December 22, “is too illiterate to write in any measure or style that does not savour of balladism. This is much to be regretted, for he is possessed of no ordinary power.” In a letter of February 17, 1815, finally, he refers to “the insupportable slovenliness, and neglect of syntax and grammar, by which Hogg's writings are disfigured.” See Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, ii, 148; 149; 146; 152–153; 155; and Knight, ii, 35; 36; 40; 50–51.) Every reader of Wordsworth knows his beautiful Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg of November, 1835. Yet in the note appended thereto he describes the Shepherd as “ undoubtedly a man of original genius, but of coarse manners and low and offensive opinions.”

¹¹⁹ T. Sadler, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson (1869), ii, 38. Just before Hogg's trip to the Lakes Byron wrote Tom Moore, “The said Hogg is a strange being, but of great, though uncouth, powers. I think very highly of him, as a poet; but he, and half of these Scotch and Lake troubadours, are spoilt by living in little circles and petty societies”: Prothero, iii, 119. (De Quincey considers this letter in some remarks of his on Wordsworth, mistakenly stating that it is addressed to Hogg, not Moore: Masson, ii, 438 and note.)—Other references to Byron's letter to Hogg appear in the former's Reply to Blackwood's Magazine (1820): Prothero, iv, 494; as well as in Southey's second letter to The Courier, December 8, 1824, included in Prothero, vi, 398.

¹²⁰ A Reply to Z by William Hazlitt (1923), pp. 31–32.—Hazlitt wrote this acrid piece originally for the Scots Magazine, as a reply to (probably Wilson's) attack, Hazlitt Cross-questioned, which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in August, 1818. The retort, not printed probably for prudential reasons in the Whig periodical, has been edited, more than a hundred years later, by Charles Whibley. For the article on Wordsworth mentioned above see the Examiner, xiv, 541, 555, 636: Nos. 347 (August 21, 1814); 348 (August 28, 1814); 353 (October 2, 1814). The last is signed “W.H.” See also Waller and Glover, The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1902–4), xi, 572–575. These editors point out that Hazlitt omitted from his Round Table (1817) many eulogistic passages of the original. As printed in the Examiner, the articles certainly deserve Wordsworth's enthusiasm. The first two of these original articles are referred to by Lamb in a letter to Wordsworth on September 19, 1814: see W. C. Hazlitt, Letters of Charles Lamb (1886), i, 434–435.

¹²¹ Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, ii, 156. Compare Knight, ii, 51.

¹²² Mrs. Gordon, pp. 119, 134.

¹²³ Ibid., p. 130.

¹²⁴ Lang, i, 104.

¹²⁵ Maria Cramer, Thomas De Quincey und John Wilson (1929), p. 19: “Er [Wordsworth] parodiert ihn [Wilson] in einigen Versen, die J. G. Lockhart in einer Edinburger Privatpresse entdeckte.”

¹²⁶ Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, ii, 162. Knight omits all but the last sentence, ii, 79.

¹²⁷ Ibid., ii, 164. See also Knight, ii, 81.—Knight omits one sentence that Gillies gives elsewhere in this letter: “First, let me correct an error Mr. Wilson has led you into: I never saw Sir E. Brydges but once; it was at dinner, but in so large a party that I had scarcely any conversation with him.”

¹²⁸ Knight, ii, 162.—Compare Wordsworth's own letter of disgust, Ibid., ii. 124 and 126.

In some articles on Wordsworth contributed to Tait's Magazine of 1839, De Quincey, with characteristic tactlessness, includes Wilson's name in some of his slurs at the poet. One example, only, may be included here: in the article of January, 1839, he writes: “I shall acknowledge then, on my own part—and I feel that I might even make the same acknowledgment on the part of Professor Wilson, (though I have no authority for doing so)—that to neither of us, though, at all periods of our lives, treating him with the deep respect which is his due, and, in our earlier years, with a more than filial devotion—nay, with a blind loyalty of homage, which had in it, at that time, something of the spirit of martyrdom, which, for his sake, courted even reproach and contumely; yet to neither of us has Wordsworth made those returns of friendship and kindness which most firmly I maintain that we were entitled to have challenged,” etc. etc. Tait's Magazine (Second Series), vi, 11. (The long passage of which this is a part is omitted in Masson: compare Masson, ii, 229 ff.) In a conversation with Viscount Cranbrook, September 15, 1843, Wilson speaks of these articles. De Quincey, he says, “behaved ill when he left Westmoreland, and wrote very bitter papers against Wordsworth … and in them most improperly introduced my name, parenthetically, ‘and Professor Wilson says the same,‘ when I had neversaid anything of the sort. From this it has been said that I quarrelled with Wordsworth, whom, God knows, I love and revere as I have always done, and am as far from envy or jealousy of him as man can be. I had too much pride to enter into any explanation to Wordsworth, but I have never ceased to love him, and his warmth and cordiality to me and my daughter when we lately met quite affected me”: National Review (April, 1884), iii, 158. In connection with the very last remark a letter of Edward Quillinan to H. C. Robinson, August 25, 1843, is of interest. On Thursday last, Quillinan writes, “Professor Wilson and his daughter Miss Wilson dined with us … ane we found them very agreeable company; but the cheerfulness of the Professor, I fear, is rather assumed. I understand that he has never recovered the shock of his wife's death. … Both Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth were very glad to meet so old a friend. Mrs. Wordsworth has always been an admirer and lover of Wilson. Don't be jealous; her husband is not”: Knight, iii, 279–80.

¹²⁹ London Magazine, ii, 512, note.

¹³⁰ Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, ed. by Lord John Russell (1854), v, 9.

¹³¹ Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott (1894), ii, 341.—Perhaps it is worth adding that Wordsworth wrote a letter of recommendation for Wilson when the latter gained the professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1820.