Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/174

 168 Whitford She grants some virtues to Wordsworth's best poems, also, and praises his effort "to bring back our poetry to the simplicity of nature. " But there is more than a touch of irony in her praise: "Everything is pare from the hand of untutored nature; no.- do we discover a single thought or phrase that might not have been uttered by a promising child of six years old. " 28 More thorough criticism of the romantic position, but no more severe, appears in Richard Mant's Simpliciad (1808). This poem is a straightforward but courteous rebuke for Words- worth, Coleridge, and Sou they on account of their departure in several respects from the conventions of English poetizing. The criticism is professedly based upon classical principles, or, as the author expresses the matter, "suggested by Horace's Art of Poetry, and improved by a Contemplation of the Works of the first Masters." 29 He regrets especially that the Lake poets are not consent with the recognized English metres of Milton, Dryden, Thomson, Pope, and Cowper, but must rummage Percy's Reliques: In sapphics limp, or amble in dactylics, Trip it in Ambrose Philips' trochaics: In dithyrambics vault, or hobble in prosaics. 80 While the passages which have been mentioned are by no means all of satire's criticism of the English romantic movement, they show the characteristic quality of that criticism. In the period under consideration, advocacy of romantic ideas by writers of verse-satire was both uncommon and insignificant. Many satirists attacked romantic writers and their works, but attacked them rather from the point of view of conventional morals or conservative politics than from that of regular criti- cism. A few romantic poets, however, were rebuked in verse 28 The Epics of the Ton, 10. 29 A part ot the title as quoted in The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitiie Poetry, for 1808-1809 (London, 1812), 569. I have been unable to secure a copy of The Simpliciad. In contrast with these unfavorable criticisms are the compliments for Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Lloyd, and Lamb in in a semi-satirical piece, Poetic Sympathies, published in Poems, by George Dyer (London, 1801), 256-302. 30 Quoted by Wm. E. Axon in "News for Bibliophiles" in the Nation (New York), vol. 94, no. 2436, Mar. 7, 1912, p. 231.