page 992 note 1 Talfourd bad met Lamb “at the beginning of the year 1815,” when he was living in chambers in Inner Temple-lane and “attending tbose of Mr. Chitty, the special pleader, which were on the next staircase to Mr. Lamb's.” In Feb. Talfourd's Attempt to Estimate the Poetical Talent of the Present Age (discussed in tome detail later) took favorable notice of Lamb at a poet and thus prepared the way for the introduction just noted.

page 992 note 2 Pref. to the fait priv. ed. of Talfourd's Ion, pp. xii-xiii.

page 992 note 3 Tha only modern published study of Talfourd it that of the late Robert S. Newdick on Talfourd as an editor and biographer. This is a monograph in the Ohio State Univ. Studie series entitled The First ‘Life and Letters’ of Charles Lamb (1935). My own admiration for Talfourd goes back a number of years to a time when I was reading quite extensively in the periodical literature of the early 19th century and came to value highly those occasional articles which I read under the signature of “T.N.T.” Sometime later these initials came to be associated with Talfoard, and still later with Robert S. Newdick. Ultimately my search far Talfourd materials in American and British libraries led me to Columbus, Ohio, and Mrs. Newdick, who generously made available to me a rich store of Talfourd materials. To Mrs. Newdick, therefore, and to the late Robert S. Newdick of the Ohio State University I wish to acknowledge an indebtedness that it not ordinary. In a sense this study is a sort of collaborative effort.

page 993 note 4 His opinions of Southey, Crabbe, Campbell, Moore, Lamb, and Coleridge attest his critical soundness, but an even better evidence perhaps is his courage in passing judgment on Scott and Byron, the two most popular poets of the day. Scott, he says, does little more than write entertaining stories of bygone times, costumed and fitted with romabtic forms, replete with fine descriptions of external and human nature, and told in facile verse, but “he is destitute of the superior skill which lays open the soul.” He reveals nothing of the heart of man or the secrets of nature. Byron's excellence he readily acknowledges, but he too is declared to lack the qualities that make the truly great poet.

page 993 note 5 For a full report on this matter, see my “Wordsworth, the ‘Lake’ Poets, and their Contemporary Reviewers, 1798–1820,” SP, xlii (Jan. 1945), 87–113. There were 18 reviews of Pter Bell (1819), 9 of them preponderantly unfavorable, 4 preponderantly favorable, 5 with an almost equal share of praise and censure; of The Waggoner (1819) there ware 15 reviews, 7 preponderantly unfavorable, 3 preponderantly favorable, and 5 with a mixture of petite and censure.

page 993 note 6 There were 12 reviews of the Poems of 1807, 8 of them preponderantly unfavorable, 1 preponderantly favorable, 3 with a mixture of praise and centum, and 1 of uncertain attitude.

page 994 note 7 I (Oct. 1802), 63: a review of Robert Southey's Thalaba, the Destroyer.

page 996 note 8 He had, however, written on Lamb's works in John Thelwall's Champion, May 1819.

page 994 note 9 He wrote many other magazine articles of a non-literary character.

page 994 note 10 Monthly Repository, xv (Feb. 1820), 95–99.

page 998 note 11 Only the month before–xiv (Oct. 1820), 361–368—the New Monthly Magasine itself had spoken of Wordsworth and his followers as poes who “trifle with the babyism of children—who affect the idiotism of fools both in sentiment and expression, and institute a poetical bedlam on the top of Parnassus... neglect rational exalted man, to lavish its powers upon naturals, idiots, and madmen... silliness, rudeness, meanness, affectation, eccentric thinking and false simplicity, which when it is not mere babyism degenerates into perfect folly.” For an examination of the views of other magazines, see Ward (n. 5, above), pp. 100–108.

page 999 note 12 London Mog., iii (April 1820), 406–413. As in his “Mojern Periodical Literature” article in the New Monthly Mog.,xiv (Aug. 1820), 305–306, Talfourd condemns the all too common practice of using a pigeon-holing term such as “Lake School.” He stresses the differences between three “Lake Poets” like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lloyd.

page 999 note 13 He did, however, continue occasionally to write criticisms on the drama and reviews o novels for the New Monthly Magasine.

page 1000 note 14 In 1825, e.g., he wrote to Henry Colburn and laid before him a proposal for an anthology of poetry; in 1841 he delivered a famous but unsuccessful Speech for the Defendant in the Court of Queen's Bench against the indictment of Moxon for publishing Shelley's “scandalous, impious, profane” works of 1839; in 1845 in Vacation Rambles and Thoughis he gave his opinions of Tennyson.

page 1000 note 15 These lectures were given on 21 and 28 Oct. and (apparently) on 11 Nov. and were reported, though rather unsatisfactorily, in the Reading Mercury. Reading was the city of Talfourd's birth.