SOURCE: Review of Rural Tales and Poems, by Robert Bloomfield. British Critic 19 (April 1802): 338-43.

In the following excerpt, the author finds Bloomfield's second book an extension of the virtuosity of his first.

We are pleasingly called away from our abstruser studies, by these productions of a genuine Child of Nature. In Bloomfield's first Poem, the Farmer's Boy, we saw and commended the evidence of an original genius, well deserving of encouragement and cultivation¹. The public has agreed with us, and five editions of that work exhibit the most unequivocal attestation of general favour. Of the author's history, as detailed in the Preface, by Mr. C. Lofft, we gave a sketch in the article referred to in the margin, and we are happy now to add to it, in the words of the author himself:

“The consequence has been such as my true friends will rejoice to hear; it...