those two lines, one in the Merchant of Venice, where

he speaks of moonlight,

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank, and the other in Lear, where the poor old heartbursting king, finding his trembling fingers too weak for him, and yet not forgetting the habitual politeness of his rank, turns to somebody and says,

Pray you undo this button;-thank you, Sir

he would have left to all posterity two exquisite proofs of his natural greatness in poetry, the one for fancy, the other for feeling. But on the other hand, Collins has left us little or nothing written in a natural language; almost the whole of his thoughts are turned upon personifications and learned abstractions, and expressed in what may be called the learned language of poetry; yet to say nothing of his Odes on the Passions and Manners, there would be sufficient in that on the Poetical Character to stamp him a true poet; and Mr. Wordsworth, by the way, with an evident feeling to this effect, has written an ode to his memory. It is the same with what Dryden

calls the "admirable Grecisms" of Milton*. Milton

Essay on Satire, prefixed to the Juvenal.

could write with a natural greatness, though not so well as Shakspeare; but he chose also at times to be more artificial, and if he has been so too often, it only shews that his genius had less natural greatness about it and a smaller consciousness of resources, not that he had then put off his poetry altogether. Had he heard, in his time, of the project for excluding all language and all associations from poetry, but those of natural passion and humanity, he would have spoken with new feelings of the cessation of those ancient oracles, that have breathed out upon us a second inspiration; he would have lamented that

Apollo from his shrine

Should no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving;

and have told us, with a share in the general sorrow, how

The lonely mountains o'er,

And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament:

From haunted spring and dale,

Edg'd with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent;

With flow'r-inwoven tresses torn

The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thicket mourn.

If it were merely to keep such verses as these fresh for posterity, it would be worth while to protest against the exclusion of one species of poetry, merely because it has an elder and nobler brother. But the truth is, the exclusion would do harm to the cause of poetry in general; it would cut off, as we have seen, a direct portion of the skilful and delightful from poetry, it would hinder a number of subjects from being treated poetically, that are now recommendable to the world by the process of versifica tion; it would rid us of one set of pretenders only to inundate us with another much more insufferable, the pretenders to simplicity; and finally, it would take away from the poetical profession something that answers to good breeding in manners, and that keeps it clear from rusticity and the want of an universal reception; for Shakspeare, who might be thought a counter-example from his want of scholastic learning, is in fact a singular example the other way, enriching the ground-work of his writings with figures and metaphors even to crowding, and evidently alive to all the use and dignity of classical allusion not

that a poet is always to be shewing his reading or learning, or letting the secret of his taste escape him; but that his taste in one respect, if managed like Shakspeare's, will teach him to feel what is best and most tasteful in others, and enable him to give a simple or passionate expression as much perfection on the score of nature, as a compounded and elaborate one upon that of art. Mr. Wordsworth, with something of a consciousness on this head, talks of selection in the very midst of what appears to others an absolute contempt of it. Now selection has an eye to effect, and is an acknowledgment that what is always at hand, though it may be equally natural, is not equally pleasing. Who are to be the judges then between him. and his faults? Those, I think, who delighted with his nature, and happy to see and to allow that he has merits of his own superior to his felicitous imitations of Milton, (for the latter, after all, though admired by some as his real excellence, are only the occasional and perhaps unconscious tributes of his admiration) are yet dissatisfied and mortified with such encounterings of the bellman, as Harry Gill and We

are Seven; who think that in some of the effusions called Moods of My Own Mind, he mistakes the commonest process of reflection for it's result, and the ordinary, every-day musings of any lover of the fields for original thinking;-who are of opinion, in short, that there is an extreme in nature as well as in art, and that this extreme, though not equally removed from the point of perfection, is as different from what it ought to be and what nature herself intended it to be, as the ragged horse in the desart is to the beautiful creature under the Arab, or the dreamer in a hermitage to the waking philosopher in society.

To conclude this inordinate note: Mr.Wordsworth, in objecting to one extreme, has gone to another,the natural commencement perhaps of all revolutions. He thinks us over-active, and would make us over-contemplative, a fault not likely to extend very widely, but which ought still to be deprecated for the sake of those to whom it would. We are, he thinks, too much crowded together, and too subject, in consequence, to high-fevered tastes and worldly infections. Granted:-he, on the other hand, lives too much