Wordsworth, The River Duddon

Wordsworth, River Duddon (1820); [Gold’s] London Magazine, I (June 1820), 618-627. The intellectual pretensions of this reviewer are exposed at once in his pontifications about Cowley, “one of the principal founders of ... the metaphysical school” and his “disciple,” “the great and intellectual Donne.” The pseudo-erudition derives, in this case, from Dr. Johnson’s life of Cowley, but the florid style is the reviewer’s own.