Matthew Henry John Bartlett

“I wish you would write a poem in blank verse,” Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth, in 1799, “addressed to those who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes for the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes.

[from The Making of the English Working Class, by EP Thomspon]