BON GAULTIER, WORDSWORTH, AND THE " TIME S." , [To
THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR.") SIR,—No doubt history is apt to repeat itself, but if the writer of the article on the" Laureateship " in the literary supplement of the Times of last Thursday (June 5th) had only referred to a recent edition of the "Bon Gaultier Ballads" he would
not have fallen into the mistake of thinking that " Bon Gaultier's" parody was actually Wordsworth's own produc- tion. In a note to the sonnet on the Laureateship in the sixteenth edition, published in 1904, of the " Bon Gaultier Ballads," Sir Theodore Martin writes:—
" The sonnet hero ascribed to Wordsworth must have been believed by some matter-of-fact people to be really by him. On his death in 1850, in an article on tho subject of the vacant Laureateship, it was quoted in a leading journal as proof of Wordsworth's complacent estimate of his own supremacy over all contemporary poets. In writing the sonnet I was well aware that there was some foundation for his not unjust high apprecia- tion of his own prowess, as the phrase 'sole bard' pretty clearly indicates, but I never dreamt that anyone would fail to see the joke."
Was the "leading journal" which made the mistake in 1850
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