received with a degree of favour, which, young as I was, I well know
was bestowed on them not so much for any positive merit, as because
they were considered buds of hope, and promises of better works to
come. The critics of that day, the most flattering, equally with the
severest, concurred in objecting to them obscurity, a general
turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets
[1]. The first is the fault which a writer is the least able to detect
in his own compositions: and my mind was not then sufficiently
disciplined to receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my
own conviction. Satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could
not have been expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I
forgot to inquire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a
degree of attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry.
This remark however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the
Religious Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to its full
extent, and not without sincere acknowledgments both to my private and
public censors for their friendly admonitions. In the after editions,
I pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best
efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction;
though in truth, these parasite plants of youthful poetry had
insinuated themselves into my longer poems with such intricacy of
union, that I was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from
the fear of snapping the flower. From that period to the date of the
present work I have published nothing, with my name, which could by
any possibility have come before the board of anonymous criticism.
Even the three or four poems, printed with the works of a friend [2],
as far as they were censured at all, were charged with the same or
similar defects, (though I am persuaded not with equal justice),--with
an excess of ornament, in addition to strained and elaborate diction.
I must be permitted to add, that, even at the early period of my