Richard Mant Mant published "The Simpliciad", a satirical poem that parodied "Poems, in Two Volumes" (1807) by William Wordsworth. He gave notes relating his parodies to the originals. The aim of the work included the other Lake Poets, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with "To a Young Ass" by Coleridge used to guy the group as a whole. Mant's "Ancient Hymns from the Roman Breviary" (1837) was one of the earliest collections of translated Latin hymnody in English. He belonged to a group of revivalist translators of Latin hymns, with John Chandler (1806–1876) and Isaac Williams. John Ellerton commented on his
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that the poem may have been inspired by the voyage of Thomas James into the Arctic. According to William Wordsworth, the poem was inspired while Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy were on a walking tour through the Quantock Hills in Somerset. The discussion had turned to a book that Wordsworth was reading, "A Voyage Round The World by Way of the Great South Sea" (1726) by Captain George Shelvocke. In the book, a melancholy sailor, Simon Hatley, shoots a black albatross: As they discussed Shelvocke's book, Wordsworth proffers the following developmental critique to Coleridge, which importantly contains a reference