The other reviews of Christabel were all unfavorable. Most extravagant was the utterance of the Monthly Magazine, XLVI, p. 407, in 1818, when it declared that the "poem of Christabel is only fit for the inmates of Bedlam. We are not acquainted in the history of literature with so great an insult offered to the public understanding as the publication of that r[h]apsody of delirium."
Hazlitt's primitive remarks on the metre of Christabel are of little interest. Coleridge was, of course, wrong in stating that his metre was founded on a new principle. The irregularly four-stressed line occurs in Spenser's Shepherd's Calender and can be traced back through the halting tetrameters of Skelton. Coleridge himself alludes to this fact in his note to his poem The Raven, and elsewhere.
Coleridge's earlier poetical publications were received with commonplace critiques usually mildly favorable. For reviews of his Poems (1796) see Monthly Rev., XX, n.s., p. 194; Analytical Rev., XXIII, p. 610; British Critic, VII, p. 549; and Critical Rev., XVII, n.s., p. 209; the second edition of Poems (1797) is noticed in Critical Rev., XXIII, n.s., p. 266; for Lyrical Ballads, see under Wordsworth; for the successful play Remorse (1813), see Monthly Rev., LXXI, n.s., p. 82, and Quarterly Rev., XI, p. 177.
Robert Southey
Madoc, a ponderous quarto of over five hundred pages and issued at two guineas, was published by Southey in 1805 as the second of that long-forgotten series of interminable epics including Thalaba, The Curse of Kehama, and Roderick, Last of the Goths. These huge unformed productions were not poems, but metrical tales, written in a kind of verse that could have flowed indefinitely from the author's pen. In short, Southey was not a poet, and the whole bulk of his efforts in verse, with but one or two exceptions, seems destined to oblivion. As poet-laureate for thirty years and the associate of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the "Lake School," Southey will, however, remain a figure of some importance in the history of English poetry.
The review of Madoc reprinted from the Monthly Rev., XLVIII (113-122) for October, 1805, was written in the old style then fast giving way to the sprightlier methods of the Edinburgh. Here we find a style abounding in literary allusions and classical quotations, and evincing a generally patronizing attitude toward the author under discussion. Most readers will agree with the sentiments expressed by the reviewer, who succeeded in making his article interesting without descending to the depths of buffoonery. No apology is necessary for the excision of the reviewer's unreasonably long extracts from the poem. Madoc was also reviewed at great length in the Edinburgh Review by Francis Jeffrey.
[61]. Ille ego, qui quondam, etc. The lines usually prefixed to the Æneid.
[61]. Prorumpere in medias res. Cf. Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 148.
[61]. Macklin's Tragedy. Henry VII (1746), his only tragedy, and a failure.