Hazlitt, a very young man, strongly prejudiced in favour of the new
ideas, has given us a notion of the amazement with which he listened
to these pieces of Wordsworth, although he was "not critically nor
sceptically inclined." Others, we know, were deeply scandalised. I
have little doubt that Wordsworth himself considered that, in 1798,
his own admirers were scarcely ripe for the publication of _Peter
Bell_, while, even so late as June 1812, when Crabb Robinson borrowed
the MS. and lent it to Charles Lamb, the latter "found nothing good in
it." Robinson seems to have been the one admirer of _Peter Bell_ at
that time, and he was irritated at Lamb's indifference. Yet his own
opinion became modified when the poem was published, and (May 3, 1819)
he calls it "this _unfortunate_ book."[1] In another place (June 12,
1820) Crabb Robinson says that he implored Wordsworth, before the book
was printed, to omit "the party in a parlour," and also the banging of
the ass's bones, but, of course, in vain.
[Footnote 1: The word _unfortunate_ is omitted by the editor,
Thomas Sadler, perhaps in deference to the feelings of Wordsworth's
descendants.]
In 1819 much was changed.
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