It would certainly have been a great object to me to have reaped the profits I should have done from my writings but for the stupidity of Mr. Gifford and the impertinence of Mr. Jeffrey. It would have enabled me to purchase many books which I could not obtain, and I should have gone to Italy earlier, which I never could afford to do until I was sixty-five, when Moxon gave me a thousand pounds for my writings. This was the only kind of injury Mr. Jeffrey did me, for I immediately perceived that his mind was of that kind that his individual opinion on poetry was of no consequence to me whatever; that it was only by the influence his periodical exercised at the time in preventing my poems being read and sold that he could injure me.... I never, therefore, felt his opinion of the slightest value except in preventing the young of that generation from receiving impressions which might have been of use to them through life. [Footnote E: "Prose Works," III., 381.] This is grand self-confidence; and it is in the same tone that elsewhere he says: Feeling that my writings were founded on what was true and spiritual in human nature, I knew the time would come when they must be known. In this connexion the English reviews of that time are still interesting reading, particularly the "Quarterly" and the "Edinburgh." What was Jeffrey saying in his "organ" during the years of Wordsworth's earlier fame? In 1807 he described the poem of "The Beggars" as "a very paragon of silliness and affectation"; and he said of "Alice Fell," "If the printing of such verses be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." Two years later he calls upon the patrons of the Lake school of poetry to "think with what infinite contempt the powerful mind of Burns would have perused the story of Alice Fell and her duffle cloak, of Andrew Jones and the half-crown, or of little Dan without breeches and his thievish grandfather." Wordsworth dropped the poem of "Andrew Jones," and never restored it--an omission almost unique, as we shall see; for he stood by the substance of his work, if not always by the form, with great pertinacity. He said of "Alice Fell," in his old age, "It brought upon me a world of ridicule by the small critics, so that in policy I excluded it from many editions of my poems, till it was restored at the request of some of my friends." Wordsworth had no stancher friend, his poetry had no more delicate critic, than Charles Lamb; and Lamb wrote thus in 1815 to Wordsworth about "Alice Fell" and the assailants of the poem. He said: "I am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stript shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice: I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls."