Snug coterie, and literary lady."
Beppo, stanza lxxvi. lines 7, 8, Poetical Works, 1901, iv. 184, note.]
[264] [The caged starling, by its repeated cry, "I can't get out! I can't get out!" cured Yorick of his sentimental yearnings for imprisonment in the Bastille. See Sterne's Sentimental Journey, ed. 1804, pp. 100-106.]
[265] [In his Essay, Supplement to the Preface (Poems by William Wordsworth, ed. 1820, iii. 315-348), Wordsworth maintains that the appreciation of great poetry is a plant of slow growth, that immediate recognition is a mark of inferiority, or is to be accounted for by the presence of adventitious qualities: "So strange, indeed, are the obliquities of admiration, that they whose opinions are much influenced by authority will often be tempted to think that there are no fixed principles in human nature for this art to rest upon.... Away, then, with the senseless iteration of the word popular! ... The voice that issues from this spirit [of human knowledge] is that Vox Populi which the Deity inspires. Foolish must he be who can mistake for this a local acclamation, or a transitory outcry—transitory though it be for years, local though from a Nation. Still more lamentable is his error who can believe that there is anything of divine infallibility in this clamour of that small though loud portion of the community ever governed by factitious influence, which under the name of the Public, passes itself upon the unthinking for the People." Naturally enough Byron regarded this pronouncement as a taunt if not as a challenge. Wordsworth's noble appeal from a provincial to an imperial authority, from the present to the future, is not strengthened by the obvious reference to the popularity of contemporaries.]
[266] {215}[Southey's Madoc in Wales, Poetical Works, Part I. Canto V. Ed. 1838, v. 39.]
Not having looked at many of that hue,
Nor garters—save those of the "honi soit"—which lie
Round the Patrician legs which walk about,
The ornaments of levee and of rout.—[M.S.]