2. It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained
that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another result
of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. It
appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accounts
with their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellers
were defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened for them
amounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some ??260.--Miss
Meteyard's _A Group of Englishmen_, p. 99.
3. After quoting the
two concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's" rebuke of her inconstant
sisters, in the words
"I alone am faithful, I
Cling to him everlastingly,"
De Quincey proceeds: "The sentiment is diabolical; and the question
argued at the London dinner-table (Mr. Sotheby's) was 'Could the writer
have been other than a devil?'... Several of the great guns among the
literary body were present--in particular Sir Walter Scott, and he, we
believe, with his usual good nature, took the apologetic side of the
dispute; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the
author, knew at first whose good name was at stake.
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