The Spirit of the Age to have inaugurated the Romantic movement in English poetry with the publication in 1798 of their "Lyrical Ballads". Hazlitt was introduced to Wordsworth by Coleridge, and both had a shaping influence on him, who was privileged to have read "Lyrical Ballads" in manuscript. Though Hazlitt was never close with Wordsworth, their relationship was cordial for many years. As between Coleridge and Hazlitt, as well as Southey and Hazlitt, differences between Wordsworth and Hazlitt over politics were a major cause of the breakdown of their friendship. But there was another cause for the rupture. Hazlitt had reviewed Wordsworth's "The Excursion" in
Recollections of the Lake Poets Lakes and the Lake Poets" (1862); that title may or may not have originated with De Quincey. There were three twentieth-century editions of the essays. Edward Sackville-West's "Recollections of the Lake Poets" (1948) and John E. Jordan's "Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets" (1961) both relied primarily upon the 1854 revised texts; for his 1970 edition, David Wright returned to the original magazine texts and to the title of the 1862 collection. Recollections of the Lake Poets Recollections of the Lake Poets is a collection of biographical essays written by the English author Thomas De Quincey. In these essays, originally