p. 192. _Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers_. Dykes Campbell quotes a letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which he attributes to the year 1797, in which Coleridge says: "I sent to the _Monthly Magazine_ three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, etc. etc., exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc. etc. The instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them 'Nehemiah Higginbottom.' I think they may do good to our young Bards." Coleridge's humour, which begins as early as 1794, with the lines on "Parliamentary Oscillators," is one of the outlets of an oppressively ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which seems to exult in its mastery over material so foreign to it. Yet he has not always or wholly command of this humour. The famous "Lines to a Young Ass" were first written as a joke, and there is some burlesque strength in such lines as: "Where Toil shall wed young Health, that charming Lass! And use his sleek cows for a looking-glass." But the mood went, the jest was so far forgotten as to be taken seriously by himself, and turned into the sober earnest which it remains; a kind of timidity of the original impression crept in, and we are left to laugh rather at than with the poet. End of Project Gutenberg's Poems of Coleridge, by Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons