“Sent _Peter Bell_ to Chas. Lamb. To my surprise, he does not like it. He complains of the slowness of the narrative--as if that were not the _art_ of the poet. He says Wordsworth has great thoughts, but has left them out here. [And then continues in his own person.] In the perplexity arising from the diverse judgments of those to whom I am accustomed to look up, I have no resource but in the determination to disregard all opinions, and trust to the simple impression made on my own mind. When Lady Mackintosh was once stating to Coleridge her disregard of the beauties of nature, which men commonly affect to admire, he said his friend Wordsworth had described her feeling, and quoted three lines from ‘_Peter Bell_:’ ‘A primrose by a river brim ‘A yellow primrose was to him, ‘And it was nothing more.’ “‘Yes,’ said Lady Mackintosh--‘that is precisely my case.’” _Thomas De Quincey._ On the same page of that _Diary_--where I go to verify this quotation--is this entry: “At four o’clock dined in the [Temple] Hall with De Quincey,[9] who was very civil to me, and cordially invited me to visit his cottage in Cumberland. Like myself, he is an enthusiast for Wordsworth. His person is small, his complexion fair, and his air and manner are those of a sickly and enfeebled man.”[10] Some twenty-seven years before the date of this encounter, the sickly looking man was born near to Manchester, his father being a well-to-do merchant there--whose affairs took him often to Portugal and Madeira, and whose invalidism kept him there so much that the son scarce knew him;--remembers only how his father came home one day to his great country house--pale, and propped up with pillows in the back of his carriage--came to die. His mother, left with wealth enough for herself and children, was of a stern Calvinistic sort; which fact gives a streak of unpleasant color here and there to the son’s reminiscences. He is presently at odds with her about the Bath school--where he is taught--she having moved into Somersetshire, whereabout she knows Mistress Hannah More; the boy comes to know this lady too, with much reverence. The son is at odds with his mother again about Eton (where, though never a scholar, he has glimpses of George III.--gets a little grunted talk even, from the old king)--and is again at odds with the mother about the Manchester Grammar School: so much at odds here, that he takes the bit fairly in his mouth, and runs away with _Euripides_ in his pocket. Then he goes wandering in Wales--gypsy-like--and from there strikes across country blindly to London, where he becomes gypsy indeed. He bargains with Jews to advance money on his expectations: and with this money for “sinker,” he sounds a depth of sin and misery which we may guess at, by what we know, but which in their fulness, even his galloping pen never told. Into some of those