DEAR Wordsworth, I told you my Review was a very imperfect one. But
what you will see in the Quarterly
is a spurious one which Mr. Baviad
Gifford has palm’d upon it for mine. I never felt more
vexd in my life than when I read it. I cannot give you an idea of what he has
done to it out of spite at me because he once sufferd me to be called a lunatic
in his Thing. The language he has alterd throughout.
Whatever inadequateness it had to its subject, it was in point of composition
the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ, and so my sister (to whom alone I
read the MS.) said. That charm if it had any is all gone: more than a third of
the substance is cut away, and that not all from one place, but passim, so as to make utter nonsense. Every warm
expression is changed for a nasty cold one. I have not the cursed alteration by
me, I shall never look at it again, but for a specimen I remember I had said
the Poet of the Excursn.
“walks thro’ common forests as thro’ some Dodona or
enchanted wood, and every casual bird that flits upon the boughs, like that
miraculous one in Tasso, but in
language more piercing than any articulate sounds, reveals to him far
higher lovelays.” It is now (besides half a dozen alterations in
the same half dozen lines) “but in language more intelligent reveals to him”—that is one I remember. But
that would have been little, putting his damnd Shoemaker phraseology (for he
was a shoemaker) in stead of mine, which has been tinctured with better authors
than his ignorance can comprehend—for I reckon myself a dab at Prose—verse I leave to my betters—God help them, if they
are to be so reviewed by friend and foe as you have been this quarter. I have
read “It won’t
do.” But worse than altering words, he has kept a few members
only of the part I had done best, which was to explain all I could of your
“scheme
| 1815 | THE MUTILATING GIFFORD | 453 |
But I could not but protest against your taking that thing as mine. Every pretty expression, (I know there were many) every warm expression, there was nothing else, is vulgarised and frozen—but if they catch me in their camps again let them spitchcock me. They had a right to do it, as no name appears to it, and Mr. Shoemaker Gifford I suppose never wa[i]ved a right he had since he commencd author. God confound him and all caitiffs.
