Footnotes

THE ORIGINAL OF THE ALBUM 'FULL OF PIOUS EFFUSIONS', MOCKED BY WORDSWORTH AND SOUTHEY, which features in a letter sent by Southey from Harrogate that same day to his friend Grosvenor Bedford: 'A lady here, whom we never saw, nor ever before heard of, sent her album for Wordsworth and myself to write in... When the book came, it proved to be full of pious effusions from all the most noted Calvinist preachers and missionaries. As some of these worthies had written in it texts in Hebrew, Chinese, and Arabic, I wrote in Greek, 'If we say that we have no sin,' &c., and I did not write in it these lines, which the tempting occasion suggested:- "What? will-we, nill-we, are we thrust/ Among the Calvinistics --/ The covenanted sons of schism,/ Rebellion's pugilistics./ Needs most we then ourselves array/ Against these state tormentors;/ Hurrah for Church and King, we say,/ And down with the dissenters"', adding 'Think how it would have astonished the fair owner to have opened her album, and found these verses in it, signed by R. S. and W. W.' (C.C. Southey, Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, 1849-50, v, p.302). Southey's entry is indeed, as he relates, in Greek and quotes 1 John i 8, 9. Wordsworth's is equally pointed and taken from Cowper's Task: "Knowledge is proud that She has learn'd so much,/ Wisdom is humble that She know no more".

The entry immediately preceding the above makes Southey's point. It takes the form of a meditation signed by the well-known Congregational minister William Jay, ending: "There the foot no thorn 'ere peirces [sic]/ There the heart ne'er heaves a sigh;/ There in white, we walk with Jesus,/ with our lov'd connexions by:/ and to reach it,/ Tis a PRIVELEDGE to die" (verses which the author was to include in his Morning Exercises in the Closet of 1829, a work so popular that it ran through ten editions). The presumptuous lady possessed of the album appears to have been Julia, wife of the well-known Congregational hymnist George Rawson.