Rejected Addresses; Or, The New Theatrum PoetarumSmith, James
General
Rejected Addresses; Or, The New Theatrum Poetarum
Smith, James
Parodies
be ranked among the most ardent admirers of this true poet; and if he
himself could see the state of his works, which are ever at our right
hand, he would, perhaps, receive the manifest evidences they exhibit of
constant reference and delighted re-perusal, as some sort of _amende
honorable_ for the unfairness of which we were guilty when we were less
conversant with the higher inspirations of his muse. To Mr. Coleridge,
and others of our originals, we must also do a tardy act of justice, by
declaring that our burlesque of their peculiarities has never blinded us
to those beauties and talents which are beyond the reach of all ridicule.
One of us {0d} had written a genuine Address for the occasion, which was
sent to the Committee, and shared the fate it merited, in being rejected.
To swell the bulk, or rather to diminish the tenuity of our little work,
we added it to the Imitations; and prefixing the initials of S. T. P. for
the purpose of puzzling the critics, were not a little amused, in the
sequel, by the many guesses and conjectures into which we had ensnared
some of our readers. We could even enjoy the mysticism, qualified as it
was by the poor compliment, that our carefully written Address exhibited
no “very prominent trait of absurdity,” when we saw it thus noticed in
the _Edinburgh Review_ for November 1812:—“An Address by S. T. P. we can
make nothing of; and professing our ignorance of the author designated by
these letters, we can only add, that the Address, though a little
affected, and not very full of meaning, has no very prominent trait of
absurdity, that we can detect; and might have been adopted and spoken, so
far as we can perceive, without any hazard of ridicule. In our
simplicity we consider it as a very decent, mellifluous, occasional
prologue; and do not understand how it has found its way into its present
company.”
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