Authority and fashion, elegance or arrangement, were hooted out of countenance, as pedantry and prejudice.  Every one did that which was good in his own eyes.  The object was to reduce all things to an absolute level; and a singularly affected and outrageous simplicity prevailed in dress and manners, in style and sentiment.  A striking effect produced where it was least expected, something new and original, no matter whether good, bad, or indifferent, whether mean or lofty, extravagant or childish, was all that was aimed at, or considered as compatible with sound philosophy and an age of reason.  The licentiousness grew extreme:  Coryate’s Crudities were nothing to it.  The world was to be turned topsy-turvy; and poetry, by the good will of our Adam-wits, was to share its fate and begin de novo.  It was a time of promise, a renewal of the world and of letters; and the Deucalions, who were to perform this feat of regeneration, were the present poet-laureat and the two authors of the Lyrical Ballads.  The Germans, who made heroes of robbers, and honest women of cast-off mistresses, had already exhausted the extravagant and marvellous in sentiment and situation:  our native writers adopted a wonderful simplicity of style and matter.  The paradox they set out with was, that all things are by nature equally fit subjects for poetry; or that if there is any preference to be given, those that are the meanest and most unpromising are the best, as they leave the greatest scope for the unbounded stores of thought and fancy in the writer’s own mind.  Poetry had with them “neither buttress nor coigne of vantage to make its pendant bed and procreant cradle.”  It was not “born so high:  its aiery buildeth in the cedar’s top, and dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.”  It grew like a mushroom out of the ground; or was hidden in it like a truffle, which it required a particular sagacity and industry to find out and dig up.  They founded the new school on a principle of sheer humanity, on pure nature void of art.  It could not be said of these sweeping reformers and dictators in the republic of letters, that “in their train walked crowns and crownets; that realms and islands, like plates, dropt from their pockets”:  but they were surrounded, in company with the Muses, by a mixed rabble of idle apprentices and Botany Bay convicts, female vagrants, gipsies, meek daughters in the family of Christ, of ideot boys and mad mothers, and after them “owls and night-ravens flew.”  They scorned “degrees, priority, and place, insisture, course, proportion, season, form, office, and custom in all line of order":—­the distinctions of birth, the vicissitudes of fortune, did not enter into their abstracted, lofty, and levelling calculation of human nature.  He who was more than man, with them was none.  They claimed kindred only with the commonest of the people:  peasants, pedlars, and village-barbers were their oracles and bosom friends.  Their poetry, in the extreme to which it professedly