Note 5 — DEDICATION.[1]
Reading edition
{5}Wordsworth's place may be in the Customs—it is, I think, in that or the Excise—besides another at Lord Lonsdale's table, where this poetical charlatan and political parasite licks up the crumbs with a hardened alacrity; the converted Jacobin having long subsided into the clownish sycophant [despised retainer,—MS. erased] of the worst prejudices of the aristocracy.
[Wordsworth obtained his appointment as Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland in March, 1813, through Lord Lonsdale's "patronage" (see his letter, March 6, 1813). The Excursion was dedicated to Lord Lonsdale in a sonnet dated July 29, 1814—
"Oft through thy fair domains, illustrious Peer, In youth I roamed ... Now, by thy care befriended, I appear Before thee, Lonsdale, and this Work present."]