something more than usually strong and extensive inversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy a reputation, that could either require or stand so merciless and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of anger, therefore, (for which, indeed, on my own account, I have no pretext,) I may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise that after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults which I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in the interim, I should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after month, (not to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker revolution, "or weekly or diurnal,") have been for at least seventeen years consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost ranks of the proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall I explain this? Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly cannot attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to feelings of vindictive animosity. Not to the former; for, with the exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so before they were known as authors, I have had little other acquaintance with literary characters than what may be implied in an accidental introduction, or casual meeting in a mixt company. And, as far as words and looks can be trusted, I must believe that, even in these instances, I had excited no unfriendly disposition.* Neither by letter, or in con beyond the common social interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had reason to suppose my convictions fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I may add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief, rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds common to both sides, from which to commence its explanation. Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few pages which I have published. are of too distant a date; and the extent of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been popular at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible, the excitement of envy on their ac count; and the man who should envy me on any other, verily he must be envy-mad! Lastly; with as little semblance of reason could I suspect any animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited and distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From my first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals, lived either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects of national interest, published at different times, first in the Morning Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of lectures on the principles of criticism as applied to Shakspeare and Milton, constitute my whole publicity; the only occasions on which I could offend any member of the republic of letters. With one solitary exception, in which my words were first mis-stated, and then wantonly applied to an individual, I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to give a course of lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of the English poetry in its different eras; first, from Chaucer to Milton; second, from Dryden inclusive * Some years ago, a gentleman, the chief writer and conductor of a celebrated review, distinguished by its hostility to Mr. Southey, spent a day or two at Keswick. That he was, without diminution on this account, treated with every hospitable attention by Mr. Southey and myself, I trust I need not say. But one thing I may venture to notice, that at no period of my life do I remember to have received so many. and such high colored compliments in so short a space of time. He was likewise circumstantially informed by what series of accidents it had happened, that Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Southey, and I, had become neighbors; and how utterly unfounded was the supposition, that we considered ourselves as belonging to any common school, but that of good sense, confirmed by the long-established models of the best times of Greece, Rome, Italy, and England; and still more ground-qualified admiration of our elder writers, from the indiscrimiless the notion, that Mr. Southey, [for, as to myself, I have published so little, and that little of so little importance, as to make it almost ludicrous to mention my name at all,] could have been concerned in the formation of a poetic sect with Mr. Wordsworth, when so many of his works had been published, not only previously to any acquaintance between them, but before Mr. Wordsworth himself had written any thing but in a diction ornate, and uniformly sustained; when, too, the slightest examination will make it evident, that between those and the after writings of Mr. Southey, there exists no other difference than that of a progressive degree of excellence from progressive development of power, and progressive facility from habit and increase of experience. Yet Among the first articles which this man wrote after his return from Keswick, we were characterized as "the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes." In reply to a letter from the same gentleman, in which he had asked me, whether I was in earnest in preferring the style of Hooker to that of Dr. Johnson, and Jeremy Taylor to Burke, I stated, somewhat at large, the comparative excellences and defects which characterised our best prose writers, from the reformation to the first half of Charles II.; and that of those who had flourished during the present reign, and the preceding one. About twelve months afterwards, a review appeared on the same subject, in the concluding paragraph of which the reviewer asserts, that his chief motive for entering into the discussion, was to separate a rational and nate enthusiasm of a recent sch ol, who praised what they did not understand, and caricatud what they were unable to imitate. And, that no doubt mi be left concerning the persons alluded to, the writer annexes the names of Miss Baillie, R. Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. For that which follows, I have only hear-say evidence, but yet such as demands my belief; viz. that on being questioned concerning this apparently wanton attack, more especially with reference to Miss Baillie, the writer had stated as his motives, that this lady, when at Edinburgh, had declined a proposal of introducing him to her; that Mr. Southey had written against him; and Mr. Wordsworth had talked contemptuously of him; but that as to Coleridge, he had noticed him merely because the names of Southey and Wordsworth and Coleridge always went together. But if it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half the anecdotes which I either myself know to be true, or which I have received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning the characters, qualifications, and motives of our anonymous critics, whose decisions are oracles for our reading public, I might safely borrow the words of the apocryphal Daniel; "Give me lears, O Sovereign Public, and I shall slay this dragon without sword or staff." For the compound would be the "Pitch, and fat, and hair, which Daniel took, and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof, and put into the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and Daniel saidlo, these are the gods ye worship." to Thomson; and third, from Cowper to the present day, I changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the two former eras, that I might furnish no possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant to misapply, my words, and having stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current coin in the marts of garrulity or detraction. Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Harrington, Machiavel and Spinosa, are not read, because Hume, Condillac, and Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company, no prudent man will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. If I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of individuals, I would oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my reason and feelings, with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable conversation, where, however strong the reasons might be, the feelings that prompted them would assuredly be at tributed by some one or other to envy and discontent. Besides, I well know, and I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment, are the natural reward of authors without feeling or genius. "Sint unicuique sua premia." How, then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require all three to explain? The solution may seem to have been given, or at least suggested, in a note to a preceding page. I was in habits of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however, transfers, rather than removes, the difficulty. Be it, that by an unconscionable extension of the old adage, "noscitur a socio," my literary friends are never under the water-fall of criticism, but I must be wet through with the spray: yet, how came the torrent to descend upon them? First, then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general reception of his earlier publications, viz. the poems published with Mr. Lovell, under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two vo lumes of poems under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the critics by profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:-careless lines, inequality in the merit of the different poems, and, (in the lighter works,) a predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such faults as might have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting, a party spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who, with all the courage of uncorrupted youth, had avowed his zeal for a cause which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression, by whatever name consecrated. But it was us little objected by others, as dreamt of by the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or, indeed, that he pre tended to any other art or theory of poetic diction beside that which we may all learn from Horace, Quintilian, the admirable dialogue de Causis Corruptæ Eloquentia, or Strada's Prolusions; if, indeed, natural good sense, and the early study of the best models in his own language, had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced, was, that in his taste and estimation of writers, Mr. Southey agreed far more with Warton than with Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny that, at all times, Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir Philip Sydney, in preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry, to twenty indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. And by what have his works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the preceding, but by greater splendor, a deeper pathos, profounder reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre? Distant may the period be but whenever the time shall come when all his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his biographer, I trust, that an excerpta of all the passages in which his writings, name, and character, have been attacked, from the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an accompaniment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in after times I dare not hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate, and such readers will become, in all pro. ability, more numerous in proportion as a still greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of sciolists, and sciolism brings with it petulance and presumption. In times of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sunk still lower, to that of entertaining companions; and, at present, they seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the decision, (in the words of Jeremy Taylor,) "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner." The same gradual retrograde movement may be traced in the relation which the authors themselves have assumed toward their readers. From the lofty address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam, which, that posterity should be possessed of he deemed their interest;" or from dedication to monarch or pontiff, in which the honor given was asserted in equipoise to the patronage ac knowledged from PINDAR'S Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number, addressed themselves to "learned readers;" then aimed to conciliate the graces of "the candid reader;" till the critic, still rising as the author sunk, the amateurs of literature, collectively, were erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as THE TOWN! And now, finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous PUBLIC, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism. But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of its invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of the muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of the harem. Thus, it is said that St. Nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one and sunk out of sight; thus, too, St. Cecilia is said to have been first propitiated by musicians, because, having failed in her own attempts, she had taken a dislike to the art, and all its successful professors. But I shall probably have occasion, hereafter, to deliver my convictions more at large concerning this state of things, and its influences on taste, genius and morality. fact, that if, in a volume of poetry, the critic should find poem or passage which he deems more especially worthless, he is sure to select and reprint it in the review; by which, on his own grounds, he wastes as much more paper than the author as the copies of a fashionable review are more numerous than those of the original book; in some, and those the most prominent instances, as ten thousand to five hundred. I know nothing that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or painter (not by characteristic defects; for where there is genius, these always point to his characteristic beauties; but) by accidental failures or faulty passages; except the impudence of defending it, as the proper duty, and most instructive part, of criticism. Omit, or pass slightly over, the expression, grace, and grouping of Raphael's figures; but ridicule in detail the knitting-needles and broom-twigs, that are to represent trees in his back grounds; and never let him hear the last of his gallipots! Admit, that the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton are not without merit; but repay yourself for this concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on the University Carrier! As a fair specimen of his sonnets, quote "a book was writ of late called Tetrachordon ;" and as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal translation of the first and second psalm! In order to justify yourself, you need only assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the beauties and excellences of the poet, the admiration of these might seduce the attention of future writers from the objects of their love and wonder, to an imitation of the few poems and passages in which the poet was most unlike himself. But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till, in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed can In the "Thalaba," the "Madoc," and still more evidently in the unique* “Cid,” the "Kehama," and as last, so best, the "Don Roderick," Southey has given abundant proof," se cogitasse quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non sæpe tractandum quod placere et semper et omnibus cupiat." Plin. Ep. Lib. 7. Ep. 17. But, on the other hand, I guess that Mr. Southey was quite unable to comprehend wherein could consist the crime or mischief of printing half a dozen or more playful poems; or, to speak more generally, composi-ons of criticism, previously established and deduced tions which would be enjoyed or passed over, accord- from the nature of man, reflecting minds will proing as the taste and humor of the reader might chance nounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themto be; provided they contained nothing immoral. In selves, to men of letters, as the guides of their taste the present age, “perituræ parcere chartæ," is em- and judgment. To the purchaser and mere reader, phatically an unreasonable demand. The merest it is, at all events, an injustice. He who tells me trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold better claims that there are defects in a new work, tells me nothing to its ink and paper, than all the silly criticisms, which which I should not have taken for granted without prove no more than that the critic was not one of his information. But he who points out and elucithose for whom the trifle was written, and than all dates the beauties of an original work, does indeed the grave exhortations to a greater reverence for the give me interesting information, such as experience public. As if the passive page of a book, by having would not have authorized me in anticipating. And an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly as to compositions which the authors themselves assumed at once locomotive power and a sort of ubi-announce with "Hæc ipsi novimus esse nihil," why quity, so as to flutter and buzz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage. But what gives an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious *I have ventured to call it "unique," not only because I know no work of the kind in our language (if we except a few chapters of the old translation of Froissart,) none which, uniting the charms of romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing, and yet leaves so much for after reflection; but likewise, and chiefly, because it is a compilation which, in the various excellences of translation, selection, and arrangement, required, and proves greater genius in the compiler, as living in the present state of society, than in the original composers. should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only because the one author was alive, and the other in his grave? What literary man has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? I am not perhaps the only one who has derived an innocent amusement from the riddles. conundrums, tri-syllable lines, &c. &c. of Swift and his correspondents, in hours of languor, when, to have read his more finished works would have been useless to myself, and, in some sort, an act of injustice to the author. But I am at a loss to conceive by what perversity of judgment these relaxations of his genius could be employed to diminish his fame as the writer of "Gulliver's Travels," and the "Tale of the Tub." Had Mr. Southey written twice as many poems of inferior merit, or partial interest, as have enlivened the journals of the day, they would have added to his honor with good and wise men, not merely, or principally, as proving the versatility of his talents, but as evidences of the purity of that mind which, even in its levities, never wrote a line which it need regret on any moral account. I have, in imagination, transferred to the future biographer the duty of contrasting Southey's fixed and well-earned fame, with the abuse and indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from his early youth to his ripest manhood. But I cannot think so ill of human nature as not to believe, that these critics have already taken shame to themselves, whether they consider the object of their abuse in his moral or his literary character. For reflect but on the variety and extent of his acquirements! He stands second to no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist, (for the articles of his composition in the reviews are, for the greater part, essays on subjects of deep or curious interest, rather than criticisms on particular works,*) I look in vain for any writer, who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy. His prose is always intelligible and always entertaining. In poetry he has attempted almost every species of composition known before, and he has added new ones; and if we except the highest lyric, (in which how few, how very few even of the greatest minds have been fortunate,) he has attempted every species successfully; from the political song of the day, thrown off in the playful overflow of honest joy and patriotic exultation, to the wild ballad ;t from epistolary ease and graceful narrative, to austere and impetuous moral declamation; from the pastoral claims and wild streaming lights of the “Thala....,” in which sentiment and imagery have given permanence even to the excitement of curiosity; and from the full blaze of the "Kehama," (a gallery of finished pictures in one splendid fancy piece,, in which, notwithstanding the moral grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance of the colouring, and the boldness and novelty of the machinery,) to the more sober beauties of the "Madoc ;" and, lastly, from the Madoc to his “Roderick,” in which, retaining all his former excellences of a poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he has surpassed himself in language and metre, in the construction of the whole, and in the splendor of particular passages. Here, then, shall I conclude? No! The characters of the deceased, like the encomia on tombstones, *See the articles on Methodism, in the Quarterly Review; the small volume of the New System of Education, &c. † See the incomparable" Return from Moscow," and the "Old Woman of Berkeley." as they are described with religious tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy, indeed, but yet with rational deduction. There are men who deserve a higher record; men with whose characters it is the interest of their contemporaries, no less than that of posterity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet possible for impartial censure, and even for quicksighted envy, to cross-examine the tale without offence to the courtesies of humanity; and while the eulogist detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must pay the full penalty of his baseness in the contempt which brands the convicted flatterer. Publicly has Mr Southey been reviled by men, who (I would fain hope for the honor of human nature) hurled firebrands against a figure of their own imagination publicly have his talents been depreciated, his princi ples denounced; as publicly do 1, therefore, who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave recorded, that it is SOUTHEY's almost unexampled felicity to possess the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic defects. To those who remember the state of our public schools and universities some twenty years past, it will appear no ordinary praise in any man to have passed from innocence into virtue, not only free from all vicious habit, but unstained by one act of intemperance, or the degra dations akin to intemperance. That scheme of head, heart, and habitual demeanor, which, in his early manhood and first controversial writings, Milton, claiming the privilege of self-defence, asserts of himself, and challenges his calumniators to disprove; this will his school-mates, his fellow collegians, and his maturer friends, with a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of their knowledge, bear witness to, as again realized in the life of Robert Southey. But still more striking to those who, by biography, or by their own experience, are familiar with the general habits of industry and perseverance in his pursuits; the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits; his generous submission to tasks of transitory interest, or such as his genius alone could make otherwise; and that, having thus more than satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet have made for himself time and power to achieve more, and in more various departments, than almost any other writer has done, though employed wholly on subjects of his own choice and ambition. But as Southey possesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he the master even of his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his daily labors, which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical pursuits, and might be envied by the mere man of business, loses all semblance of formality in the dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring and healthful cheerfulness of his spirits. Always employed, his friends find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles, than steadfast in the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small pains and discomforts which irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggregate, so often become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility: while, on the contrary, he bestows all the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around him, or connected with him which perfect consistency, and (if such a word might be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow: when this, too, is softened without being weakened by kindness and gentleness. I know few men who so well deserve the character which an ancient attributes to Marcus Cato, namely, that he was likest virtue, inasmuch as he seemed to act aright, not in obedience to any law or outward motive, but by the necessity of a happy nature, which could not act otherwise. As son, brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm, yet light steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national independence, and of national illumination. When future critics shall weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure, it will be Southey the poet only, that will supply them with the scanty materials for the latter. They will likewise not fail to record, that as no man was ever a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and honorers among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education, quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism, were his only enemies.* * It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example of a young man, as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition and conduct as for intellectual power and literary acquirements, may produce on those of the same age with himself, especially on those of similar pursuits and congenial minds. For many years, my opportunities of intercourse with Mr. Southey have been rare, and at long intervals; but I dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet, I trust, not fleeting influence, which my moral being underwent on my acquaintance with him at Oxford, whither I had gone at the commencement of our Cambridge vacation on a visit to an old school-fellow. Not, indeed, on my moral or religious principles, for they had never been contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and dignity of making my actions accord with those principles both in word and deed. The irregularities only not universal among the young men of my standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I then learnt to feel as degrading; learnt to know that an opposite conduct, which was at that time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish prudence, might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most disinterested and imaginative. It is not, however, from grateful recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these, my deliberate sentiments, on record; but, in some sense, as a debt of justice to the man whose name has been so often connected with mine, for evil to which he is a stranger. As a specimen, I subjoin part of a note, from "the Beauties of the AntiJacobin," in which, having previously informed the public that I had been dishonored at Cambridge for preaching deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardor in defence of Christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of the French Phi- (or to speak more truly, Psi-) losophy, the writer concludes with these words: "Since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex his disce, his friends, Lamb and Southey." With severest truth it may be asserted, that it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were thus printed at full length as in the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, and who had left his children fatherless, and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that many good men remained longer than, perhaps, they otherwise would have done, adverse to a party which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious calumnies? Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales agis, scio et doleo. CHAPTER IV. The Lyrical Ballads with the preface-Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems-On fancy and imagination-The investigation of the distinction important to the fine arts. I HAVE wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from the main road, so I dare calculate on not a few who will warmly sympathise with them. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose, if I have proved, that Mr. Southey's writings, no more than my own, furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and of clamours against its supposed founders and proselytes. As little do I believe that "Mr. WORDSWORTH'S Lyrical Ballads" were in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these, confirms me in the belief, that the omission of less than an hundred lines would have precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader had taken it up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation, which the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that they were perused without knowledge of, or reference to, the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In these, as was actually the case with Mr. Southey's earlier works, the lines and passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners, conveyed in easy, yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but little poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it which seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the volume altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to be most pleased when most excited, would have contented themselves with deciding that the author had been successful in proportion to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few, perhaps, might, by their admiration of "The lines written near Tintern Abbey," those "left upon a seat under a Yew Tree," the "old Cumberland beggar," and "Ruth," have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling the the "Hart leap well," and whatever other poems in that collection may be described as holding a middle place between those written in the highest and those in the humblest style; as, for instance, between the "Tintern Abbey," and "the Thorn," or the "Simon Lee." Should their taste submit to no farther change, and still remain unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, more or less, scat Brothers." |