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So the vicious
circle is completed, for the poet is harassed by this treatment into the
belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result
his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for the public
more deliberately expressed.
At the beginning of the period under discussion the social snubs seem to
have rankled most in the poet's nature. This was doubtless a survival
from the times of patronage. James Thomson [Footnote: See the _Castle
of Indolence,_ Canto II, stanzas XXI-III. See also _To Mr. Thomson,
Doubtful to What Patron to Address the Poem,_ by H. Hill.] and Thomas
Hood [Footnote: See _To the Late Lord Mayor._] both concerned
themselves with the problem. Kirke White appears to have felt that
patronage of poets was still a live issue. [Footnote: See the _Ode
Addressed to the Earle of Carlisle._] Crabbe, in a narrative poem,
offered a pathetic picture of a young poet dying of heartbreak because
of the malicious cruelty of the aristocracy toward him, a farmer's son.
[Footnote: _The Patron.


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