under
conditions most favorable for such a malicious procedure. The publisher,
his friend Cottle, had transferred the copyright of the _Lyrical
Ballads_ to Arch, a London publisher, within two weeks of the appearance
of the volume, giving as a shallow excuse the "heavy sale" of the book.
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were in Germany. Southey had quarreled
with Coleridge, and was probably jealous of the latter's extravagant
praise of Wordsworth. He accordingly seized the opportunity to assail
the work without injuring Cottle's interests or entailing the immediate
displeasure of the travelling bards.

He covered his tracks to some extent by referring several times to "the
author," although the joint authorship was well known to him. While
severe in most of his strictures on Wordsworth, Southey reserved his
special malice for _The Ancient Mariner_. He called it "a Dutch attempt
at German sublimity"; and in a letter written to William Taylor on
September 5, 1798--probably while he was writing his discreditable
critique--he characterized the poem as "the clumsiest attempt at German
sublimity I ever saw." Southey's responsibility for the article became
known to Cottle, who communicated the fact to the poets on their return
a year later. Wordsworth declared that "if Southey could not
conscientiously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have
declined the task of reviewing it." Coleridge indited an epigram, _To a
Critic_, and let the matter drop. Shortly afterwards he showed his
renewed good-will by aiding Southey in preparing the second _Annual
Anthology_ (1800).

The subsequent reviews of the _Lyrical Ballads_ adopted the tone of the
_Critical_ (then recognized as the leading review) and internal evidence
shows that they did not hesitate to borrow ideas from Southey's article.
The _Analytical Review_ also saw German extravagances in _The Ancient
Mariner_; the _Monthly_ borrowed Southey's figure of the Italian and
Flemish painters, and called _The Ancient Mariner_ "the strangest story
of a cock and bull that we ever saw on paper ... a rhapsody of
unintelligible wildness and incoherence." The belated review in the
_British Critic_ was probably written by Coleridge's friend, Rev.
Francis Wrangham, and was somewhat more appreciative than the rest. For
further details, consult Mr. Thomas Hutchinson's reprint (1898) of the
_Lyrical Ballads_, pp. (xiii-xxviii). Despite the unfavorable reviews,
the Ballads reached a fo