The extracts which the Times prints every day from its
columns of a hundred years ago are always good reading, but perhaps none has been more interesting from a literary point of view than that of Tuesday. It is dated Septem- ber 10th, 1806, and begins as follows :—
"We have been for some days in a state of apprehension that we should be very shortly called upon to announce the dissolution of Mr. Fox, and there is every reason to expect that it will be the office of to-morrow's paper to state that event to the public."
Students of Wordsworth will remember his poem entitled "Lines Composed at Grasmere, the Author having just read in a Newspaper that the dissolution of Mr. Fox was hourly expected." We can hardly doubt that the words from the Times which we have just quoted had been read by Words- worth, and thus formed the basis of his verses. It is not often that one is able to reconstitute so exactly what we may call the physical conditions under which the subject of a poem is suggested to the poet's mind.
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