tended, and was in effect carried, levels all distinctions of nature and society; has “no figures nor no fantasies,” which the prejudices of superstition or the customs of the world draw in the brains of men; “no trivial fond records” of all that has existed in the history of past ages; it has no adventitious pride, pomp, or circumstance, to set it off; “the marshal’s truncheon, nor the judge’s robe;” neither tradition, reverence, nor ceremony, “that to great ones ’longs”:  it breaks in pieces the golden images of poetry, and defaces its armorial bearings, to melt them down in the mould of common humanity or of its own upstart self-sufficiency.  They took the same method in their new-fangled “metre ballad-mongering” scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes—­ of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion and estimation in the world.  They were for bringing poetry back to its primitive simplicity and state of nature, as he was for bringing society back to the savage state:  so that the only thing remarkable left in the world by this change, would be the persons who had produced it.  A thorough adept in this school of poetry and philanthropy is jealous of all excellence but his own.  He does not even like to share his reputation with his subject; for he would have it all proceed from his own power and originality of mind.  Such a one is slow to admire any thing that is admirable; feels no interest in what is most interesting to others, no grandeur in any thing grand, no beauty in anything beautiful.  He tolerates only what he himself creates; he sympathizes only with what can enter into no competition with him, with “the bare trees and mountains bare, and grass in the green field.”  He sees nothing but himself and the universe.  He hates all greatness and all pretensions to it, whether well or ill-founded.  His egotism is in some respects a madness; for he scorns even the admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to understand him.  He hates all science and all art; he hates chemistry, he hates conchology; he hates Voltaire; he hates Sir Isaac Newton; he hates wisdom; he hates wit; he hates metaphysics, which he says are unintelligible, and yet he would be thought to understand them; he hates prose; he hates all poetry but his own; he hates the dialogues in Shakespeare; he hates music, dancing, and painting; he hates Rubens, he hates Rembrandt; he hates Raphael, he hates Titian; he hates Vandyke; he hates the antique; he hates the Apollo Belvidere; he hates the Venus of Medicis.  This is the reason that so few people take an interest in his writings, because he takes an interest in nothing that others do!—­The effect has been perceived as something odd; but the cause or principle has never been distinctly traced to its source before, as far as I know.  The proofs are to be found every where—­in Mr. Southey’s Botany Bay Eclogues, in his book of Songs and Sonnets, his Odes and Inscriptions, so well parodied in the Anti-Jacobin Review, in his Joan of Arc, and last, though not least, in his Wat Tyler: