The _Preface_, with the little group of other prefaces and observations which supplements it,[349] provides a bundle of documents unequalled in interest except by the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ in the special class, while, as it happens, it goes directly against the tenor of that precious booklet. Wordsworth, there can be no doubt, had been deeply annoyed by the neglect or the contemptuous reception of the _Lyrical Ballads_, to which hardly any one had done justice except the future Archdeacon Wrangham, while his own poems in simple language had offended even more than _The Ancient Mariner_ had puzzled. To some extent I do not question that—his part of the scheme being to make the familiar poetical, just as it was Coleridge’s to make the unfamiliar acceptable, the uncommon common—the refusal of “poetic diction” which he here advances and defends was a _vera causa_, a true actuating motive. But there is also, I think, no doubt that, as so often happens, resentment, and a dogged determination to “spite the fools,” made him here represent the principle as much more deliberately carried out than it actually was. And the same doggedness was no doubt at the root of his repetition of this principle in all his subsequent prose observations, though, as has been clear from the first to almost all impartial observers,[350] he never, from _Tintern Abbey_ onwards, achieves his highest poetry, and very rarely achieves high poetry at all, without putting that principle in his pocket. [Sidenote: _That to_ Lyrical Ballads, 1800.] That the actual preface begins with a declaration that he was rather more than satisfied with the reception of his poems, and that the appearance of a systematic defence is set down to “request of friends,” is of course not in the least surprising, and will only confirm any student of human nature in the certainty that pique was really at the bottom of the matter. As a matter of fact, there is no more typical example of an aggressive-defensive _plaidoyer_ in the whole history of literature. [Sidenote: _Its history._]