In the interim there had appeared the Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge cites a number of the poems of 1798-1815, and criticises their style and diction at some length; and notwithstanding that Wordsworth, naturally enough, felt aggrieved at certain reflections in which Coleridge had seen fit to indulge-e.g., his Pecksniffian remarks on the lines by Mary Wordsworth in The Daffodils, his strictures (fair enough) on the passage (11. 121-124) subsequently cancelled in the Ode, and, above all, the preposterous suggestion that wherever the name Coleridge appears in the diatribes of the Edinburgh Review, it simply stands as a symbol for Wordsworth and Southey-he nevertheless wisely repressed all show of wounded feeling and proceeded to incorporate in his text most of the improvements suggested by his candid friend. This amounted to little less than a tacit abandonment of the central positions of the Preface, which indeed had already in the edition

of 1815 been degraded to the obscurity of an appendix to the second volume.

Setting aside, however, the alterations derived from the Biographia, the textual changes in ed. 1820 were few and unimportant. The first thoroughgoing revision of the text was that which was undertaken with a view to the five-volume edition of 1827. In the course of this the poet, in his anxiety to escape from the homeliness and occasional harshness of the original version, goes to the opposite extreme and adopts a tamely conventional, and at times a stilted, form of expression. Thus, for the following lines in the opening stanza of Beggars:

"A long drab-coloured Cloak she wore,

A Mantle reaching to her feet:

What other dress she had I could not know;"

-a description tautological, and ridiculously flatWordsworth substitutes in 1827:

"Nor claimed she service from the hood

Of a blue mantle, to her feet

Depending with a graceful flow;"

-lines at once vague and, as the poet himself admitted, unpleasantly high-flown. A like objection may be brought against the lines:

"Her suit no faltering scruples checked;
Forth did she pour, in current free,
Tales that could challenge no respect
But from a blind credulity;"

-which were substituted in 1827 for lines 1-4 of stanza iii. : "Before me begging did she stand," etc. (Note, in the version of 1827, no fewer than seven words of Latin original where, in the version of 1807, not one is to be found.) Moreover, in this edition of 1827 several new and striking images were removed, to make way for imagery of a conventionally "elegant" elegant" type. The remarkable simile at the close of Rob Roy, for instance, so truly Wordsworthian in its directness and homely force:

"And [faces] kindle, like a fire new stirr'd,

At sound of Rob Roy's name."

-is sacrificed for a line neither original nor greatly impressive in its sense; though, to be sure, so happy is it in the affluence and skilful disposition of its vowel-sounds, that its adoption in the room of the musically thin and monotonous line of 1807 must perforce be accounted a notable aesthetic gain. The cheap four-volume edition of 1832 reproduces, with one or two minor variations, the version reached in 1827; but in the stereotyped edition in six volumes, published by Moxon in 1836-7, the entire fabric of the text has been carefully overhauled, and duly braced and compacted together (see p. 192, footnote 1). This, no doubt, was a far-reaching as well as a much-needed improvement; yet apart from it-apart, that is, from the merely formal or grammatical emendations of the text-Wordsworth can hardly be reckoned fortunate in his remaniements of 1836-7.

or,

/He believed himself to be now revising his work for the last time; and where considerations deeper than those of syntax were involved, he would hesitate and debate so long and so obstinately that in the end his very anxiety often defeated itself, and the passage under consideration was left as he had found it, if altered at all, was altered for the worse. Anyhow, by 1840 this "final" text was obsolescent or even now obsolete, certain of the flatnesses and formalities having been already repented of and erased from the stereotype plates. At length, in 1845, there came a revision in which the alterations were, in by far the greater number of instances, manifest improvements also. Wordsworth no longer mistook a laborious simpleness for simplicity, or a pompous phrase for poetic elegance. His naturalness ceased to wear the appearance of design, and in his sparing use of poetic ornament he did not lose sight of the indispensableness of sincerity.

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