From: benlizro@ihug.co.nz   
      
   Well, yes, we have a letter of that date in which he promises his   
   publisher that the Preface will be sent "in four days at furthest".   
   He had started writing it a couple of days earlier. The 15th was a   
   Monday, so he means (says Crystal) "by the end of the week". Yes, very   
   plausible, I've probably done the same. But he didn't actually finish it   
   (we know from Dorothy Wordsworth's journal) until the 30th.   
   Nevertheless, the book (poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge) was   
   published, the following year, and the Preface is "now seen as a   
   manifesto of the Romantic movement" (Crystal).   
      
   And the language link? Well, he says in the Preface that they are going   
   to "choose incidents and situations from common life" and describe them   
   "in a selection of language really used by men", whilst also doing   
   something poetic with them. He also opines that in "humble and rustic   
   life...the essential passions of the heart...speak a plainer and more   
   emphatic language."   
      
   "Really used by men"?   
   "The language was certainly a great deal 'plainer' than the crafted   
   elegance of many previous writers, but it was still some way from   
   everyday rustic domestic speech, as pointed out by Coleridge in his   
   _Biographia Literaria_ a few years later."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)