ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Satire: The Epics of the Ton. Everyone knows how meritoriously Wordsworth has laboured to back our poetry to the simplicity of nature. In his unsophisticated pages one discovers no gaudy trappings, no blazing metaphors, no affected attempts at poetic diction. Everything is pure from the hand of untutored nature; nor do one discovers a single thought or phrase that might not have been uttered by a promising child of six years old. Surely it would be far more gratifying to see the streams of poetry distributed in all the fantastic shapes known two centuries ago. The ancient definition of an epic poem appears, as is usual with beauties of antiquity, to have a reference to striking analogies in nature. It is rather mortifying to the love of posthumous fame, to observe how much more a person of great celebrity in the fashionable world is greeted with complimentary poems while alive than by elegies after death.
