However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the
attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion,
as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of
passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a
bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found
in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the
worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a
rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend
whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and
strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere,
making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and
subjects of Mr. Wordsworth's minor poems; I admitted that there were
some few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find
a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I
mentioned Alice Fell as an instance; "Nay," replied my friend with
more than usual quickness of manner, "I cannot agree with you there!--
that, I own, does seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem." In the
Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience does not enable me to extend the
remark equally unqualified to the two subsequent volumes,) I have
heard at different times, and from different individuals, every single
poem extolled and reprobated, with the exception of those of loftier
kind, which as was before observed, seem to have won universal praise.
This fact of itself would have made me diffident in my censures, had
not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of
the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of
the faults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulcia
vitia of Cowley, Marine, or Darwin might reasonably be thought capable
of corrupting the public judgment for half a century, and require a
twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in order to dethrone the