ABSTRACT
Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814); review by John Herman Merivale, Monthly Review, 2nd Series, LXXVI (Feb. 1815), 123–136. Merivale, minor poet and friend of Byron, reflects the attitudes toward Wordsworth of the conventional young Regency literary gentlemen – attitudes that Byron himself shared most of his life. Merivale expresses himself respectfully and with judgment (as on page 129, where he begs to be excused from appreciating what he terms Wordsworth’s mysticism), but he is too much a rational man of the London social world to sympathize with Wordsworth’s poetic aims or methods.
