Naturally introspective, he was driven by abuse
and ridicule into taking stock of himself more frequently and more
laboriously than ever. He formed an estimate of himself and his
writings which was, on the whole, (as will now be generally admitted,)
a just one; and this view he expressed when occasion offered--in
sober language, indeed, but with calm conviction, and with precisely
the same air of speaking from undoubted knowledge as when he
described the beauty of Cumbrian mountains or the virtue of Cumbrian
homes.
"It is impossible," he wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1807,
"that any expectations can be lower than mine concerning the
immediate effect of this little work upon what is called the public.
I do not here take into consideration the envy and malevolence, and
all the bad passions which always stand in the way of a work of any
merit from a living poet; but merely think of the pure, absolute,
honest ignorance in which all worldlings, of every rank and situation,
must be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings, and
images on which the life of my poems depends. The things which I
have taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do
with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from
street to street, on foot or in carriage; with Mr.
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