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Updated: October 25, 2025
Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, even to the triplet, which Swift hated so heartily as "a vicious way of rhyming wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, imitated by all the bad versifiers of Charles the Second's reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, very early the leader of reform; but, like Wesley, he endeavored a reform within the Establishment.
Was this the return for all the expenditure which had been incurred?" The comic papers poked outrageous fun at the expedition. The illustrated journals mocked it in pen and ink sketches that smarted like aquafortis. The ribald versifiers flouted it in metrical lampoons whose burden was "The man I left behind me."
There was something both solemn and pitiful about this wreck of manhood which was still kept alive by the fire of genius. "With one word you might have saved me and her!" he went on. "When you came to the Throne, and all the wretched versifiers in the kingdom were scribbling twaddle in the way of 'Coronation odes' and medleys, I wrote 'The Song of Freedom' for your glory!
Rascals send me theirs per post from America, and I have more than once been knocked up out of bed to pay three or four shillings for books of which I can't get through one page, for of all books the most insipid reading is second-rate verse." Would that versifiers took the warning!
In America, therefore, although there has been no lack of clever versifiers, nor of men who have respectably echoed the ideas current in the old world, the country has produced nothing of any value descriptive of the peculiar associations connected with its scenery.
This precocious adulation confirmed the wavering apprentice in his desire to quit the gallipots, and at the same time excited in his too susceptible mind a fatal admiration for the character and talents of the most worthless and affected of all the versifiers of our time. One of his first productions was the following sonnet, "written on the day when Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison."
Handel being only a musician, was obliged to employ some person to write his operas and oratorios, which accounts for their being so very defective as poetical compositions. One of those versifiers employed by him, once ventured to suggest, in the most respectful manner, that the music he had composed to some lines of his, was quite contrary to the sense of the passage.
As for the Essay on Man, one can read! it more than once only out of a sense of duty. Pope has nothing to tell us that we want to know about man except in so far as he dislikes him. We praise him as the poet who makes remarks as the poet, one might almost say, who makes faces. It is when he sits in the scorner's chair, whether in good humour or in bad, that he is the little lord of versifiers.
Were a foreigner to form a notion of the merit of the English poets from reading Langbaine, they would be in raptures with Randolph and Durfey, and others of their class, while Dryden, and the first-rate wits, would be quite neglected; Langbaine is so far generous, that he does all he can to draw obscure men into light, but then he cannot be acquitted of envy, for endeavouring to shade the lustre of those whose genius has broke through obscurity without his means, and he does no service to his country while he confines his panegyric to mean versifiers, whom no body can read without a certain degree of contempt.
In poetry alone they are still palpably inferior: no world-renowned minstrel has yet arisen in the New Atlantis, and the number of those versifiers who have attained a decided name and place among the lighter English literature of their day, or whose claims to the title of poet are acknowledged in all sections of their own country, is but small.
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