the
unbounded stores of thought and fancy in the writer's own mind. Poetry
had with them "neither buttress nor coigne of vantage to make its
pendant bed and procreant cradle." It was not "born so high: its aiery
buildeth in the cedar's top, and dallies with the wind, and scorns the
sun." It grew like a mushroom out of the ground; or was hidden in it
like a truffle, which it required a particular sagacity and industry to
find out and dig up. They founded the new school on a principle of sheer
humanity, on pure nature void of art. It could not be said of these
sweeping reformers and dictators in the republic of letters, that "in
their train walked crowns and crownets; that realms and islands, like
plates, dropt from their pockets": but they were surrounded, in company
with the Muses, by a mixed rabble of idle apprentices and Botany Bay
convicts, female vagrants, gipsies, meek daughters in the family of
Christ, of ideot boys and mad mothers, and after them "owls and
night-ravens flew." They scorned "degrees, priority, and place,
insisture, course, proportion, season, form, office, and custom in all
line of order":--the distinctions of birth, the vicissitudes of
fortune, did not enter into their abstracted, lofty, and levelling
calculation of human nature. He who was more than man, with them was
none. They claimed kindred only with the commonest of the people:
peasants, pedlars, and village-barbers were their oracles and bosom
friends. Their poetry, in the extreme to which it professedly tended,
and was in effect carried, levels all distinctions of nature and
society; has "no figures nor no fantasies," which the prejudices of
superstition or the customs of the world draw in the brains of men; "no
trivial fond records" of all that has existed in the history of past
ages; it has no adventitious pride, pomp, or circumstance, to set it
off; "the marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe;" neither tradition,
reverence, nor ceremony, "that to great ones 'longs": it breaks in
pieces the golden images of poetry, and defaces its armorial bearings,
to melt them down in the mould of common humanity or of its own upstart
self-sufficiency. They took the same method in their new-fangled "metre
ballad-mongering" scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes--
of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion
and estimation in the world. They were for bringing poetry back to its
primitive simplicity and sta