make a better with great ease."

Jeffrey reviewed Wordsworth and found in the "Lyrical Ballads"
"vulgarity, affectation and silliness." He is alarmed, moreover, lest
his "childishness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. He
proposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig," and of
"Alice Fell" he writes that "if the publishing of such trash as this be
not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be
insulted." When the "White Doe of Rylstone" was published--no prime
favorite, I confess, of my own--Jeffrey wrote that it had the merit of
being the very worst poem he ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume. "It
seems to us," he wrote, "to consist of a happy union of all the faults,
without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It is
just such a work, in short, as some wicked enemy of that, school might be
supposed to have devised, on purpose to make it ridiculous."

Lord Byron, on the publication of an early volume, is counselled "that he
do forthwith abandon poetry ... the mere rhyming of the final syllable,
even when accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet ... is
not the whole art of poetry. We would entreat him to believe," continued
the reviewer, "that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is
necessary to constitute a poem; and that a poem in the present day, to
be read, must contain at least one thought...." It was this attack that
brought forth Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

As long as Jeffrey hoped to enlist Southey to write for the Edinburgh
Review, he treated him with some favor. But Southey took up with the
Quarterly. "The Laureate," says the Edinburgh presently, "has now been
out of song for a long time: But we had comforted ourselves with the
supposition that he was only growing fat and lazy.... The strain, however,
of this publication, and indeed of some that went before it, makes us
apprehensive that a worse thing has befallen him ... that the worthy
inditer of epics is falling gently into dotage."

Now for the Quarterly Review, if by chance it can show an equal spleen!

There lived in the early days of the nineteenth century a woman by the name
of Lady Morgan, who was the author of several novels and books of travel.
Although her record in intelligence and morals is good, John Croker,
who regularly reviewed her books, accuses her works of licentiousness,
profligacy, irreverence, blasphemy, lib