William Hayley is perhaps destined to remain known more as the object of the satirical scorn of his betters than for his own voluminous and popular poetic output. Blake in Milton (1808") and Jerusalem (1820")-and more scurrilously in his notebook epigrams--Byron in lines 309-318 of his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), and Southey in a Quarterly Review essay (March 1825), all satirize Hayley's verse. Yet Hayley never pretended to genius. When he was asked to be poet laureate after the death of Thomas Wharton in 1790, he declined the honor.

William Hayley was born in Chichester, the second son of Thomas and Mary Yates Hayley. Thomas Hayley died when William was three, and two years later William's older brother died from an inoculation intended to protect him. In the same year, 1750, his mother moved to London, and sent William to Kingston Grammar School, where a young Edward Gibbon had studied just...