“A writer in Blackwood for November, 1829, gives an amusing sketch of a party where the ‘Intimations of Immortality,’ revered by the initiated as _the_ ‘Revelation,’ was read aloud by a true disciple, in a kind of unimaginable chant then peculiar to the sect. There were one or two believers present, with a few neophytes, and one or two absolute and wicked sceptics! No sooner had the recitation fairly commenced, than one of the sceptics, of laughing propensities, crammed his handkerchief half-way down his throat; the others looked keen and composed: the disciples groaned, and the neophytes shook their heads in deep conviction.’ The reciter proceeded with deeper unction, till on being asked by a neophyte to give an explanation, which he was unable to give, he got angry, and ‘roundly declared, that things so out of the common way, so sublime, and so abstruse, could be conveyed in no language but their own. When the reciter came to the words, ‘Callings from us,’ the neophyte again timidly requested an explanation, and was informed by one of the sceptics, that they meant the child’s transitory gleams of a glorious pre-existence, that fall away and vanish almost as soon as they appear. The obstinate neophyte only replied, in a tone of melancholy, ‘When I think of my childhood, I have only visions of traps and balls, and whippings. I never remember being “haunted by the eternal mind.” To be sure I did ask a great many questions, and was tolerably obstinate, but I fear these are not the “obstinate questionings” of which Mr. Wordsworth speaks.’ This is but a small sample of the Wordsworthian scenes and disputations then of every-day occurrence. In 1816 a kind of shadow of Horace Smith again took the field. It seems that Hogg intended to publish an anthology of the living British bards, and had written to some of them for specimens. A wag, who had heard of the project, immediately issued an anthology, purporting to be this, but containing merely the coinage of his own brain. As may be imagined, Wordsworth occupied a prominent corner; and indeed some of the imitations--for most were imitations rather than parodies--did him no discredit. ‘The Flying Tailor,’ however, was not an infelicitous burlesque of the poet’s blank verse:-- “Ere he was put By his mother into breeches, Nature strung The muscular part of his anatomy To an unusual strength; and he could leap, All unimpeded by his petticoats, Over the stool on which his mother sat, More than six inches--o’er the astonished stool!”