History of Cumbria opera", 1798) and others decried the felling of trees. A 'new Picturesque' sensibility emerged. 'Attempts were made to 'blend in' the villas being built with the natural landscape. The "Lake Poet School" (or 'Bards of the Lake', or the 'Lake School') was initially a derogatory term ("the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes", according to Francis Jeffrey) that was also a misnomer, as it was neither particularly born out of the Lake District, nor was it a cohesive school of poetry. The principal members of the 'group' were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.
The Spirit of the Age with admiration for the richness of Hazlitt's style, traced his writing on Southey from the "savage" attacks in 1816 and 1817 through the more balanced assessment in this sketch. Paulin especially notes allusive and tonal subtleties in Hazlitt's poetic prose that served to highlight, or at times subtly qualify, the portrait of Southey he was trying to paint. This, Paulin observes, is an example of how Hazlitt "invest[s] his vast, complex aesthetic terminology with a Shakespearean richness ... perhaps the only critic in English" to do so. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was an English poet, often considered, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge,