Book VIII., lines 568-571.

P. 202. _As the Prince Regent did with Sherry_--_i.e._, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

_'Twould make George Colman melancholy._ George Colman was author of _Broad Grins_ and other humorous work.

P. 203. _May Carnage and slaughter._ The reference here is to lines in Wordsworth's _Thanksgiving Ode on the Battle of Waterloo_ (later _Ode_, 1815), as originally published:

But Thy most dreaded instrument In working out a pure intent, Is Man--arrayed for mutual slaughter. --Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!

P. 205. _The immortal Described by Swift._ Presumably a reference to the undying Struldbrugs of _Gulliver's Travels_, 'despised and hated by all sorts of people.'

P. 206. _'Twould have made Guatimozin doze._ Guatimozin or Cuauhtemoc was the last of the Aztec emperors, executed with circumstances of great cruelty by Cortes.

P. 206. _Like those famed Seven who slept three ages_--_i.e._, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus who, according to a Syrian legend, hid themselves in a cave during the Decian persecution (A.D. 250), fell asleep and awakened miraculously nearly two hundred years later.

P. 215. '_&c._' This ending is in accord with the original text.

P. 218. _He lived amidst th' untrodden ways._ Mr. Walter Hamilton, whose large collection of parodies is well known, attributes this parody to Hartley Coleridge, but efforts to trace it have failed.

P. 219. _Peter Bell: a Lyrical Ballad._ When Wordsworth's _Peter Bell_ was announced in 1819, John Hamilton Reynolds wrote--it is said in a single day--this _Lyrical Ballad_ and hurried it out before Wordsworth's poem was issued. The fact that Reynolds used Wordsworth's measure suggests that he had seen a copy of the original. It was a criticism by Leigh Hunt of Wordsworth's _Peter Bell_ and Reynolds' parody that moved Shelley to the writing of _Peter Bell the Third_. To his _Peter Bell_ Reynolds attached a _Preface_ and a short _Supplementary Essay_, also purporting to be written by W. W.

'It is now (the _Preface_ began) a period of one-and-twenty years since I first wrote some of the most perfect compositions (except certain pieces I have written in my later days) that ever dropped from poetical pen.... It has been my aim and my achievement to deduce moral thunder from buttercups, daisies, celandines, and (as a poet scarcely inferior to myself, hath it) "such small deer." Out of sparrows' eggs I have hatched great truths, and with sextons' barrows have I wheeled into human hearts piles of the weightiest philosophy.... Of _Peter Bell_ I have only thus much to say: It completes the simple system of natural narrative, which I began so early as 1798. It is written in that pure unlaboured style, which can only be met with among labourers.... I commit my Ballad confidently to posterity. I love to read my own poetry: it does my heart good.'

In the _Supplementary Essay_ 'W. W.' was made to declare that he proposed 'in the course of a few years to write laborious lives of all the old people who enjoy sinecures in the text or are pensioned off in the notes of my Poetry.'

P. 221. _As clustering a relationship._ See _The Critic_, Act II.,