Introduction

Echoing in title and governing conceit Horace and James Smith’s enormously successful collection of parodies Rejected Addresses: or the New Theatrum Poetarum (1812), P. G. Patmore’s Rejected Articles, published anonymously by Henry Colburn in 1826, masquerades as a collection of contributions discarded from the most notable periodicals of the Romantic period (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, the London Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, Cobbett’s Register). This device enables Patmore to imitate the style of some of the most notable essayists of the post-Napoleonic period; Cobbett, Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb, Jeffrey and Wilson amongst them. The laudatory review of the second edition of the Rejected Articles published in the Literary Chronicle in August 1826 sets out the bill of fare which is placed before the reader:

He can dream with Elia in Dessin’s Hotel, or wander with him to the market-place of Calais . . . Or should he prefer Old England and politics, to Calais ... he may listen to an address from William Cobbett to the ploughboys and labourers of Hampshire, to the identity of which we should almost imagine that W. C. himself might safely swear. . . Or Horatio Smith shall build up for him all the airy fabrics which eternally decorate ‘To-morrow’; or we shall dine out with the same gentleman . . . Or, (and was ever critic in such delicate and delightful embarrassment as to choice?) he may discuss the merits of Shakspeare’s Romeo and Juliet with Professor Wilson, – lose all sense of critical dignity for a full month, in consequence of coming into contact with The Grimm’s Ghost of James Smith, – bury himself under a heap of beautiful metaphors and amusing parodies, with the author of Table Talk, – criticise Brother Jonathan in company with Francis Jeffery [sic], or recline under the Greenwood Shade, and talk of Boccaccio and Fiametta with Leigh Hunt. ¹