ABSTRACT
Wordsworth, Poems (1807); British Critic, XXXIII (March 1809), 298–299. This hostile review was obviously influenced by the ridicule heaped upon Wordsworth’s manner and doctrine in The Simpliciad, A Satirico-Didactic Poem (1808), the author of which was reputed to have been Richard Mant (1776–1848), in 1798 Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1813 chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and by 1820 a bishop of the Anglican church in Ireland. Mant’s connections might well have given him friends among the reviewers for the British Critic — he may have been one himself — and this late notice of Wordsworth’s Poems seems almost an added puff for The Simpliciad rather than a serious attempt to treat Wordsworth’s poetry.
