17 And Wordsworth, one day, made his very hairs bristle, By going and changing his harp for a whistle.

The allusion here scarcely needs a remark; but in revising my verses, and endeavouring to do justice to Mr. Wordsworth, I was anxious, whenever I mentioned him, to shew myself sensible of the great powers he possesses, and with what sort of gift he

has consented to trifle.

13 When one began spouting the cream of orations In praise of bombarding one's friends and relations;

Mr. Coleridge, in his Friend, ventured upon a studious and even' cordial defence (at least so his readers understood it) of the attack on Copenhagen,

-one of those lawless outrages, done in the insolence and impatience of power, which at first brought infamy, and have at last brought down retribution, upon the head of Bonaparte. The imitation of such

to be a proud enjoyment to us to witness the grateful inscriptions in gold letters with which Joshua Barnes had adorned the books that he presented to the library. As to college honours, at least in the Belles Lettres, it may be truly said that the school has of late years grown familiar with them.

actions proves how little the contest against him was understood at the time, either in it's moral or political point of view, or rather in it's only proper point of view, which comprises both ;-but the world appears to have learnt better since. The above parenthesis is used in speaking of the general accepta tion of Mr. Coleridge's meaning, because he himself, it appears, has astounded some people by deprecating such a construction.

19 And t'other some lines he had made on a straw, Shewing how he had found it, and what is was for, &c. &c.

I am told, on very good authority, that this parody upon Mr. Wordsworth's worst style of writing has been taken for a serious extract from him, and panegyrized accordingly, with much grave wonderment how I could find it ridiculous!-See the next note.

2 The bard, like a second neas, went home in't, And lives underneath it, it seems, at this moment.

If Mr. Wordsworth is at present under a cloud, it

is one, we see, of a divinity's wearing; and he may emerge from it, whenever he pleases, with a proportionate lustre. May he speedily do so! There is nobody who would be prouder to hail that new morning than myself. Apollo should have another Feast on purpose to welcome it. It certainly appears to me, that we have had no poet since the days of Spenser and Milton,-so allied in the better part of his genius to those favoured men, not excepting even Collins, who saw farther into the sacred places of poetry than any man of the last age. Mr. Wordsworth speaks less of the vulgar tongue of the profession than any writer since that period; he always thinks when he speaks, has always words at command, feels deeply, fancies richly, and never descends from that pure and elevated morality, which is the native region of the first order of poetical spirits.

To those who doubt the justice of this character, and who have hitherto seen in Mr. Wordsworth nothing but trifling and childishness, and who at the same time speak with rapture of Spenser and Milton, I would only recommend the perusal of such poems as the

Female Vagrant in Lyrical Ballads, the Nightingale, the three little exquisite pieces from p. 50 to 53 of the 2d vol. (4th edition) another at p. 136,-the Old Cumberland Beggar, (a piece of perfect description philosophized); and in the two subsequent volumes of poems,-Louisa, the Happy Warrior, to H. C., the Sonnets entitled London and Westminster Bridges, another beginning "The World is too much with us," and the majestic simplicity of the Ode to Duty, a noble subject most nobly treated. If after this, they can still see nothing beautiful or great in Mr. Wordsworth's writings, we must conclude that their insight into the beauties of Spenser and Milton is imaginary, and that they speak in praise of those writers as they do in dispraise of Mr. Wordsworth, merely by rote.

It may be asked me then, why with such opinions as I entertain of the greatness of Mr. Wordsworth's genius, he is treated as he is in the verses before us. I answer, because he abuses that genius so as Milton or Spenser never abused it, and so as to destroy those great ends of poetry, by which it should assist the

uses and refresh the spirits of life. From him, to whom much is given, much shall be required. Mr. Wordsworth is capable of being at the head of a new and great age of poetry; and in point of fact, I do not deny that he is so already, as the greatest poet of the present;-but in point of effect, in point of delight and utility, he appears to me to have made a mistake unworthy of him, and to have sought by eccentricity and by a turning away from society, what he might have obtained by keeping to his proper and more neighbourly sphere. Had he written always in the spirit of the pieces above-mentioned, his readers would have felt nothing but delight and gratitude; but another spirit interferes, calculated to do good neither to their taste nor reflections; and after having been elevated and depressed, refreshed and sickened, pained, pleased, and tortured, we close his volumes, as we finish a melancholy day, with feelings that would go to sleep in forgetfulness, and full waking faculties too busy to suffer it.

The theory of Mr. Wordsworth,if I may venture to give in a few words my construction of the