With C. Lamb. Lent him Peter Bell. To my surprise he finds nothing in it good. He complains of the slowness of the narrative, as if that were not the art of the Poet. W. he says has great thoughts, but here are none of them. He has no interest in the Ass. These are to me inconceivable judgments from C. L. whose taste in general I acquiesce in and who is certainly an enthusiast for W.
Again, on May 11, 1819, after the poem was published, Robinson says:—
L. spoke of Peter Bell which he considers as one of the worst of Wordsworth's works. The lyric narrative L. has no taste for. He is disgusted by the introduction, which he deems puerile and the story he thinks ill told, though he allows the idea to be good.
"Rogers." At the end of Samuel Rogers' poem, Human Life, 1819, is a ballad, entitled "The Boy of Egremond," which has for subject the same incident as that in Wordsworth's "Force of Prayer"—beginning
What is good for a bootless bene?
—the death of the Young Romilly as he leapt across the Strid. In Wordsworth the answer to the question is "Endless sorrow." Rogers' poem begins:—
"Say what remains when hope is fled?"
She answered "Endless weeping."
Wordsworth's Peter Bell was published a week after the mock one. To The Waggoner we shall come shortly.
The significance of the allusion to Coleridge is not perfectly clear; but I imagine it to refer to the elaborate examination of Wordsworth's poetry in the Biographia Literaria.
"These obtuse literary Bells." Peter Bell, in the poem, sounds the river with his staff, and draws forth the dead body of the ass's master. Lamb passes, in his curse, to a reference to St. Peter.