novel-pawing

Updated: May 15, 2025

Coleridge also contributed to Southey's Joan of Arc certain lines of which, many years afterwards, he wrote in this humorously exaggerated but by no means wholly unjust tone of censure: "I was really astonished at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason a Tom Paine in petticoats; at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines."

H. D. (Henry Duff) Traill - English Men of Letters: Coleridge

"I was really astonished," he said, " at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; at the transmogrification of the fanatic virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the "Age of Reason," a Tom Paine in petticoats; at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines."

Charles Lamb - The Best Letters of Charles Lamb