d by eight lines in Professor Knight's edition,
and only four of these correspond to the original text. The reviewer
confined his remarks to the first thirty lines of the poem and very
properly neglected the rest. He followed, with moderate success, the
method of quotation with interpolated sarcasm and badinage--a method
that was afterwards effectively pursued by the early Edinburgh Reviewers
and the Blackwood coterie. There are few examples of that style in the
eighteenth century reviews, but some noteworthy specimens of a later
period--_e.g._, the _Edinburgh Review_ on Coleridge's _Christabel_ and
the _Quarterly_ on Tennyson's _Poems_--are reprinted in this volume.

The review of _An Evening Walk_ is simply an appended paragraph to the
previous article. Wordsworth evidently appreciated the advice conveyed
in the reviewer's final sentence and found many of the lines that
"called loudly for amendment." More favorable notices of both poems will
be found in _Critical Review_, VIII, pp. 347 and 472.

_Lyrical Ballads_

The _Lyrical Ballads_ by Wordsworth and Coleridge were published
anonymously early in September, 1798--a few days before the joint
authors sailed for Germany. Coleridge's contributions were _The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner_, _The Foster-Mother's Tale_, _The Nightingale_, and
_The Dungeon_; the remaining nineteen poems were by Wordsworth. As the
publication of this volume has been accepted by most critics as the
first fruit of the new romantic spirit and the virtual beginning of
modern English poetry, the reception accorded to the _Lyrical Ballads_
becomes a matter of prime importance. It is well known that the effort
was a failure at first and that the apparent triumph of romanticism did
not occur until the publication of Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_
(1805); but a contemporary blindness to the beauty of two of the finest
poems in English literature cannot be permitted to figure in the
critics' dispassionate investigation of causes and influences.

There were four interesting reviews of the first edition of the _Lyrical
Ballads_, namely, (1) _Critical Rev._, XXIV, n.s. (197-204), in October,
1798, which is reprinted here; (2) _Analytical Rev._, XXVIII (583-587),
in December, 1798; (3) _Monthly Rev._, XXIX, n.s. (202-210), in May,
1799, reprinted in Stevenson's _Early Reviews_; (4) _British Critic_,
XIV (364-369) in October, 1799.

The article in the _Critical Review_ was written by Robert Southey