ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style than those of the
latest date. Their faults were at least a remnant of the former
leaven, and among the many who have done me the honour of putting my
poems in the same class with those of my betters, the one or two, who
have pretended to bring examples of affected simplicity from my
volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of a
copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and
had myself characterized, as sermoni propiora.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me
for noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the
three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to
beset a young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second
number of the Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah
Higginbottom, I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for
its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful
egotism, and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double
defect of being at once trite and licentious;--the second was on low
creeping language and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the
third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems,
on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and
imagery. The reader will find them in the note [7] below, and will I
trust regard them as reprinted for biographical purposes alone, and
not for their poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided
was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that
a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other
respects with his usual kindness, to a gentleman, who was about to
meet me at a dinner party, could not however resist giving him a hint
not to mention 'The house that Jack built' in my presence, for "that I