'in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd's and Lamb's, etc., etc., exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent in commonplace epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc., etc. The instances were almost all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb.'
The first sonnet, Coleridge said,
had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double object of being at once trite and licentious. The second was on low creeping language and thoughts under the pretence of simplicity. [Lamb had written some months earlier, 'Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge.'] The third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery.... So general at that time and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style that a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness to a gentleman who was about to meet me at a dinner-party could not, however, resist giving him a hint not to mention The House that Jack Built in my presence, for that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet, he not knowing that I was myself the author of it. (See the Oxford Coleridge.)
[P. 144.] Amatory Poems. It is curious that Southey, who had taken offence at Coleridge's sonnet To Simplicity, signed 'Nehemiah Higginbottom,' believing it directed against himself, should himself have turned parodist and adopted the similar name of 'Abel Shufflebottom' a couple of years later. Coleridge wrote, so he declared, that he might do the young poets good; Southey, it may be believed, merely to make fun of that band of vain and foolish versifiers who came to be known as 'the Della Cruscans.' Haunters of the book-stalls may yet occasionally light upon two small volumes entitled The British Album, containing the Poems of Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, Arley, Benedict, the Bard, etc., etc. Which were originally published under the Title of the Poetry of the World, revised and corrected by the Respective Authors. The second edition was dated 1790, and the work was still current when the brothers Smith gave their Laura Matilda parody in the Rejected Addresses (see p. 29). A few stanzas of one of 'Della Crusca's' poems addressed to 'Anna Matilda' will suffice to indicate the stuff which Southey was satirising:
While the dear Songstress had melodious stole
O'er ev'ry sense, and charm'd each nerve to rest,
Thy Bard in silent ecstasy of soul,
Had strain'd the dearer Woman to his breast.
Or had she said, that War's the worthiest grave,