From ‘The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth’, edited by E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), pp. 129, 638.
Wordsworth (1770–1850) appears to have had a high regard regard for Skelton.
(a) Wordsworth to Allan Cunningham, the Scottish poet, 23 November 1823. He is discussing northern English poet poets.
The list of English border poets is not so distinguished, but Langhorne (1) was a native of Westmoreland, and Brown the author of the ‘Estimate of Manners and Principles’, etc., — a poet as his letter on the vale of Keswick, with the accompanying verses, shows — was born in Cumberland. (2) So also was Skelton, a demon in point of genius; and Tickell (3) in later times, whose style is superior in chastity to Pope's, his contemporary.
(b) Wordsworth to Alexander Dyce, the editor of Skelton, 7 January 1833, referring to his then projected edition.
Sincerely do I congratulate you upon having made such progress with Skelton, a Writer deserving of far greater attention than his works have hitherto received. Your Edition will be very serviceable, and may be the occasion of calling out illustrations perhaps of particular passages from others, beyond what your own Reading, though so extensive, has supplied.
1 John Langhorne (1735–79), an eighteenth-century minor poet.
2 John Brown (1715–66); his ‘Estimate of Manners and Principles of the Times’ was published in 1757.
3 Thomas Tickell (1686–1740), a minor poet.