self in his lifetime, little as he suspected it. The Muse wearies of the swain who perpetually woos her, and worn out by having her valuable attention called on every trivial occasion, ends by remaining deaf to the most exciting and timely summons. And so, by writing about everything when there was nothing to say, Wordsworth came to be often unable to say anything when there was everything to write about.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, such was the case. Wordsworth was all poet and nothing else. Such was his bent, and circumstances favoured it. He resolved at an early age to dedicate himself to poetry; but at one time it seemed as though he would have been obliged to detract somewhat from his favourite pursuits, and to invigorate his mind and muse by a slight change of occupation. Owing to the vexatious, but too powerful, denial by Lord Lonsdale of claims. just and all but patent, Wordsworth's father, a Cockermouth attorney, died, in 1783, in somewhat straitened circumstances; and by the time twelve years had elapsed Wordsworth was at the bottom of his purse, and had made the discovery that writing poetry would not refill it. Most opportunely, as he thought—most inopportunely, as we cannot help suspecting-a friend who had formed a flattering opinion of the young versifier, died and bequeathed Wordsworth a sum of £900; and he was thus turned away from a scheme he had been driven to form, of proceeding to London and earning a livelihood by writing for the press. This £900 sufficed for his honourably simple wants and those of his dear worshipping sister Dorothy for the next seven years, during which he wrote the Lyrical Ballads' and the other works which will shortly claim our attention. At the end of that period, the Lord Lonsdale of the eighteenth century had been succeeded by a representative of more reasonable temper, and the faithful pair came in for £4000, or half of the amount tardily allotted to the family. Wordsworth may be said to have slightly imperilled the particular advantage of the windfall which he most valued--independence and leisure-by marrying his cousin Mary Hutchinson, within a twelvemonth of its tumbling in. But luck, good or ill, again secured him against distraction. He afterwards obtained from Lord Lonsdale a distributorship of stamps, which gave him nothing to do and brought him in £500 a year, which he resigned to his son only in 1842, when he received a pension of £300 per annum from the nation and the emoluments of the laureateship from the Crown. Thus was he, from first to last, enabled to concentrate his undivided attention upon poetry, occupying a position which, it is perhaps worth while to note, never till our own time fell to the lot of a poet of any consequence. Chaucer, besides being a poet, was a lawyer, a soldier, and a diplomatist. Spencer, besides writing the Faery Queen' and the Tears of the Muses,' penned a social and political treatise on Ireland, was sheriff of Cork, secretary

to Lord Grey and Wilton, and well versed in all public affairs. Shakespeare was a playwright, an actor, and a manager, no less than a dramatist. Milton was a schoolmaster and a politician, as well as the author of 'Paradise Lost.' Dryden wrote nearly a hundred plays, all against the grain, and prefaces without end to the works of others, and only snatched leisure for the cultivation of his pet pursuit from more remunerative employments. Pope translated for hire, when writing for love was not sufficiently remunerative, was an indefatigable letterwriter, and as busied with society and affairs as his sickly frame would permit. Goldsmith's financial grief and prose works have been the delight of several generations. Scott wrote his poems so fluently and so hurriedly for money, and gave up writing them altogether when they did not bring him enough. And, finally, Byron, never writing for money, though nearly always in want of it, found a foil to his inspired moments in fashionable intrigues, in manly exercises, and in the liberation of two classic nations. The only two apparent exceptions are Cowper and Shelley; and they almost cease to be exceptions when we examine the matter closely. One has only to bear in mind that Cowper lived to be seventy and wrote, when he did write, with great fluency, and then to turn to a collection of his poetical works and see how small, comparatively, is their bulk, to be satisfied that his life was not passed mainly in writing poetry. It is true that his relations, by their compassionate liberality, provided him with the means of existence which he showed himself utterly unable to provide for himself; but what with his female friends, his hares, his correspondence, and his religious exercises, he was in reality, considering the quiet and feminine nature of his life, provided with as many distractions from his muse as bards seemingly more busy and more variedly busy. It can scarcely be denied that, in a sense, Shelley was all poet; but then his poetising did not always assume the form of verse, as in the case of Wordsworth, but vented itself occasionally in social philanthropy, as in Wales-in political enthusiasm, as in Ireland-and in studying Greek philosophy, as in Italy. Moreover, whilst it is scarcely worth while to consider whether Cowper would have been improved as a poet had he been compelled to do something over and above what he did do besides writing poetry-and indeed any attempt at such compulsion would perhaps have driven him permanently, instead of fitfully, insane -we cannot doubt that Shelley's muse would have been improved if Shelley himself had undergone a little more mental discipline in some shape or other. He would have been less pulpy and more firm; more like Shakespeare, Pope, and Byron, who are the least pulpy of all our poets, and less like Cowper and Wordsworth, who are the most pulpy, and, we may add, flabby. To use a vulgar expression, Shelley would have been licked into shape, which was the one thing wanted to make his works as great as his genius. Then, indeed, we should probably

VOL. XXXIV.

Y

1

have been able to speak of him in the same breath with Byron and Shakespeare, who now stand alone in their unequalled greatness in our poetical literature.

But whilst, as we think we have shown, there is danger lest too absolute an immunity from common calls should leave a poet without that proper amount of severe drilling and varied experience which are so inestimably valuable, and which makes of him the too secure recluse that Wordsworth remained throughout his life, let it not be supposed that we are dead to that still more terrible, more frequent, and more fatal peril that besets the child of the muses who is for ever tormented by what Mr. Disraeli has so admirably described as "that ignoble melancholy which springs from pecuniary embarrassment," and who is compelled or betrayed into a continuance of uncongenial pursuits in order to earn his daily bread. Then indeed the hand becomes subdued to what it works in, and he who was once a Son of the Morning sinks into everlasting night, or worse, into that scarce perceptible twilight which is the purgatory of the mediocre.

We cannot, therefore, consider Wordsworth fortunate in those legacies which he felt to be so timely; and the mischief of too much leisure, too much solitude, and too much oneness of occupation, is abundantly apparent in his works. He thus became, as we say again for it is the key to what is good and what is worthless in his compositions, and explains the feeling with which he is regarded by most readers-all poet, and wrote page after page of innocuous, but often intolerable, stuff, and-what is still more amazing-printed it. Therefore was it that he inflicted upon the world scores of stanzas, in no one respect better, for instance, than the following:

"His fate was pitied. Him in iron case
(Reader, forgive the intolerable thought)
They hung not; no one on his form or face
Could gaze, as on a show by idlers sought;
No kindred sufferer to his death-place brought
By lawless curiosity or chance,

When into storm the evening sky is wrought,
Upon his swinging corse an eye can glance,

And drop, as he once dropped, in miserable glance."

Therefore was it that he wrote entire poems of prodigious commonplace, such as 'Peter Bell,' and 'The Idiot Boy,' over which Byron with perfect justice made so merry. Who is there that does not turn away with pity, if compassionate, with scorn, if of a more cruel mood, when he is asked to accept as poetry such luckless rhymes as the following?

"I to the Muses have been bound,

These fourteen years, by strong indentures;

O gentle Muses! let me tell

But half of what to him befel;

He surely met with strange adventures.

O gentle Muses! is this kind?

Why will ye thus my suit repel?
Why of your further aid bereave me?
And can ye thus unfriended leave me,
Ye Muses, whom I love so well?"

Therefore was it that he could actually give to the public, as a serious and worthy performance, 'Poems on the Names of Places,' with the following advertisement penned by his own hand: "By persons resident in the country and attached to rural objects, many places will be found unnamed or of unknown name, where little Incidents must have occurred, or feelings been experienced, which will have given to such places a private and peculiar interest. From a wish to give some sort of record to such Incidents, and renew the gratification of such feelings, Names have been given to places by the Author and some of his Friends, and the following Poems written in consequence.'

This unhappy proceeding arose, as we have explained, quite naturally from his disposition and habit-for with him nature and that habit which is said to be a second nature, were always one-of looking at and thinking of all things, no matter how trivial, as though they would fit into a poem. But when he had so fitted them, and the public could see nothing poetical either in the subjects or in his treatment of them, then it was that he cast about him for a theory which should satisfy himself, if nobody else, that he had not spent most of his life in writing what was very little better than nonsense. The result of this attempt at justification is embodied in a number of prefaces" and "appendixes," which are, if possible, still more the opprobrium of his critical faculties than the compositions they were written to defend are of his poetical ones. The theory he would fain develop for the benefit of mankind is much too verbosely set out to be reproduced here. Fortunately it can be compressed into a nutshell. His first proposition is that the feeling experienced by the poet gives importance to action and situation, and not action or situation importance to the feeling experienced by the poet, and, as a corollary from this, that all actions and situations are poetically important. His second proposition is that there is, or should be, no such thing as a poetic vocabulary or phraseology, and that the language of ordinary life not only suffices, but is the proper and only medium, for the expression of poetical as of all other sentiments. In other words, any subject is good enough for a poem, and any language good enough in which to write it. Wordsworth may be justly credited with being the first to expound this wonderful theory; but he was by no means the first to act upon it, otherwise we should not possess so many shelves of worthless verse. Cowper in 'The Task' devotes a hundred lines to describing the operation of growing

cucumbers, which he perhaps imagined was a worthy imitation of Virgil's Georgics;' but any one who takes the trouble to read the passage, commencing

"The stable yields a stercoraceous heap,"

will probably be inclined to form a different opinion. In all such cases we can but fall back upon our own good sense, and condemn these deviations from sound taste with no uncertain voice. "To one," says Doctor Johnson, whose sledgehammer directness and cultivated judgment would be of much service in these dilettanti days, "to one that conveys common thoughts in careless versification, it will only be said, Pauper videri Cinna vult, et est pauper. The meaning and diction will be worthy of each other, and criticism may justly doom them to perish together." The observation, occurs in his life of 'Butler;' and in the biography of Dryden may be found a remark which disposes of the rest of poor Wordsworth's precious theory: "Words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet. From those sounds which we hear on small or on coarse occasions, we do not easily receive strong impressions or delightful images; and words to which we are nearly strangers, whenever they occur, draw that attention on themselves which they should convey to things." It was this last error that Wordsworth professed to avoid; and he certainly did so. But he tumbled over head and ears into the other.

We should, however, be offering a very incomplete criticism of Wordsworth if, after pointing out, as in duty bound, the mischief which necessarily flowed from his habit of perpetually poetizing and regarding nothing as being below the dignity of verse, we did not dress the balance even by remembering that it was not unattended with certain advantages. "Throw plenty of mud," says the proverb, “and some of it will stick." Write plenty of verse, and there's a chance that some of it will be poetry. In Wordsworth's case there was far more than a chance; there was a certainty. But to put the matter on much higher ground than that, the poet who can always command leisure, will never have to turn the Muse away on the plea that business, pleasure, or mercenary toil has already engaged him. It is sad to think how many "felicities," to quote Johnson, once more, when speaking of Denham's well-known address to the Thames, "which cannot be produced at will by wit and labour, but must rise unexpectedly in some hour propitious to poetry," may have been lost by this teterrima causa, this bitter priority of vulgar occupations. It may, therefore, safely be asserted in Wordsworth's favour that under the, as we have seen, not altogether favourable conditions he chose for himself, he at least never once threw away a chance or slammed the door in the face of a celestial visitant. In the second place, though by making poetry out of everything a man will infallibly write much