entered the head of the stupidest person to put in one team? Again, what resemblance of style is there between either of the two satires we have just named, and Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers'? Even the dullest of ears had to grant, on the appearance of the Corsair,' that rhymed heroics were capable of producing a novel effect; and we may rest satisfied that their infinite variety is not yet exhausted. Byron practically introduced the ottava rima into English literature; and accordingly any one who now ventures to use it is certain to be taxed with imitating Byron. Yet if we were to ask which Byron he was imitating-the Byron of 'Beppo,' the Byron of Morgante Maggiore,' or the Byron of Don Juan,' we should probably be met with a stare of blank amazement, intended to convey the belief that the styles of 'Beppo,' of 'Morgante Maggiore,' and of Don Juan,' are surely all the same. We defy the most ingenious dissipator of radical differences to say or to indicate in any way what is Byron's style. He has fifty styles, all equally good. Is the style of Hamlet' like that of the Midsummer Night's Dream;' the style of 'Macbeth' like that of the 'Merry Wives of Windsor;' the style of King Lear' like the style of the Tempest;' or that of any one of them the same as that of the 'Sonnets,' or of the Rape of Lucrece'? From the style of Comus' could we guess the style of 'Paradise Lost;' or would the knowledge of either instruct us what to expect in L'Allegro'? Shelley is not so various as he would undoubtedly have become had he not been cut off so young; as the remarkable contrast between the 'Prometheus Unbound' and the 'Cenci' testifies. Nevertheless he must have a very small acquaintance with Shelley's works, or very meagre powers of observation, who seriously talks of Shelley's "style." A fixed style is, we repeat, the mark and opprobrium of inferior writers. We see it in a Blackmore, a Blair, a Falconer. In the present day even Mr. Tennyson, though by no means altogether wanting in variety, is too much infected with it; whilst everything but style-and that a most detestable one-is completely lost sight of in the monotonous mountebankism of Mr. Robert Browning. The foregoing remarks have a special pertinence to Wordsworth, and become imperatively necessary if, in estimating his position and value in the world of letters, we would clear the ground of misconceptions which have obtained only too wide a currency. Partly to Cowper, but still more to Wordsworth, has been attributed what would indeed have been a feat meriting eternal gratitude, had it really been performed, of purging the Hall of the Muses, which had shortly before their time become a mere Augean stable, of gross conceits, affectations, and artificialities, and of restoring to that noblest of all dwellings its native tenants-truth, simplicity, and naturalness. It so happens that nothing of the kind was necessary, though we have to thank Cowper for unconsciously abetting the idle supposition. When he said in the Table-Talk,' "Then Pope, as harmony itself exact, In verse well disciplined, complete, compact, That, quite eclipsing pleasure's painted face, Even on the fools that trampled on their laws. And every he little knew that he was providing a text for the most shallow, ignorant sermonising that criticism has ever yet preached. What he said about every warbler having his tune by heart was perfectly true; but it is more or less so of every age, and is afflictingly so in this one, when Mr. Tennyson has such a host of blank-verse imitators. As for Pope being the parent of artificialities and cold conceits, there never was a more absurd charge. It was Pope who for ever put an end to what is well designated by Johnson "the metaphysical race who pursue their thoughts to their last ramifications, by which we lose the grandeur of generality." It was Pope who rid us of those abominable quaintnesses which-be it reverently spoken--not altogether absent in some of Shakespeare's writings, and only too frequent in those of Dryden, flourished with intolerable rankness, in the interval, in the compositions of Donne, Denham, Cleveland, and Cowley. It was Pope, and none other, who may be said, in the words of Cowper, to have 66 Whipped out of sight, with satire pert and keen, The puppy pack that had defiled the scene." From the time of Pope till the present day, when indeed we are threatened with a resuscitation of the grotesque and affected tricks of the seventeenth century, artificiality-a very different thing from art, or even from artifice-has remained all but unknown in English poetical literature. The reign of Nature was restored, and restored by Pope. For it would indeed be a narrow and sorry use of language and of our understandings alike, to restrict the term Nature to the external world. Byron, no mean judge, has shown how, despite certain passages in which Pope writes of external Nature too conventionally, his works abound with new, lively, and just delineations of her moods and beauties. But Nature covers a larger world even than the glorious one of field and flood, of mountain and sky, of storm and sunset. There is such a thing as human nature, which Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley, and even Dryden, had, to use plain language, played the fool with in a solemn fashion worse than any frivolous one; and Pope brought back the true, that is to say, the natural way of dealing with it, and added enormously to the lost gift he had restored. If this be true and no one who knows anything of English literature at first hand, and who does not form his opinions upon the cries of those critical parrots who keep repeating a parodox first started by De Quincey, and first echoed by Hazlitt, in order to exalt the Lake School, will dream of doubting it-no less true is it that the alleged poetical poverty of the period which intervened between Pope at one end and Cowper and Wordsworth at the other-an allegation springing originally from the same source-is the most ridiculous of fictions. We have only to betake ourselves to the conclusive test of facts to explode this preposterous fable. Pope died in 1744. Cowper's earliest work was published in 1782; Wordsworth's first poetical performance in 1793. As it is, however, in The Task' that Cowper is supposed to have emancipated himself and literature generally from the malignant influence of Pope and his followers, let us take the date of its publication as the fairest landmark. It saw the light in 1785. We have thus an interval of forty years; an interval, according to the vulgar theory, during which the Hall of the Muses was in worse than Cimmerian darkness, and given over to screech-owls and unclean bats. The reader can scarcely fail to be startled at this marvellous piece of literary history, when we remind him that during those forty years Beattie published his 'Minstrel,' Thomson his 'Seasons' and his Castle of Indolence,' Akenside his Pleasures of Imagination,' Young his 'Night Thoughts,' Collins his Ode to the Passions,' Grey his Elegy in a Churchyard,' Churchill his stupendous satires, Chatterton his brilliant forgeries, and last, but the opposite of least, Goldsmith his Traveller' and his 'Deserted Village.' And this, forsooth, was Cimmerian darkness; this was every warbler having his tune by heart! Yet this view, and criticism formed upon this view, has been and still is the guide and inspirer of your Athenæums, Spectators, and Saturday Reviews. Without in any degree wishing to belittle Cowper, who is justly regarded as a considerable name, the man must be very corrupt or very maudlin in his taste who is not ready to endorse the dictum that the whole of 'The Task' is not worth one page of 'The Deserted Village;' and without intending to depreciate Wordsworth, who is to be the theme of our praise, it cannot be doubted that only in one of his compositions did his imagination reach the height attained in Collins' famous ode, and in none of them the lofty pathos which soothes yet elevates us in Gray's immortal elegy. Having thus cleared the ground by doing justice to those poets who have been systematically depreciated in order that Wordsworth might be more successfully extolled, let us now betake ourselves to the task of doing justice to Wordsworth, who may be extolled without anybody being depreciated. It was, as we have already had occasion to say, in An Evening Walk' and 1793 that he first came before the public. 'Descriptive Sketches' constituted his credentials to popular favour. The first was addressed to a young lady; the second were taken during a pedestrian tour on the Alps. The writer was twenty-three years of age, and had enjoyed such opportunities of culture as are afforded by an English public school and an English University. Birth that, with our modern more catholic view, may fairly be called gentle, a first-class education, the advantages of travel, abundant leisure, and a ripe youth verging on manhood, were the favourable conditions that preceded and attended these earliest efforts. What are we to say of them? That they are for the most part a medley of twaddle, sermonising, and commonplace, but too sparingly interspersed by "The still sad music of humanity;" and that almost their entire interest lies in the opportunities they afford of examining the germs of what was worst and of all but what was best in the poet's later writings. Could anything well be more deplorable than such passages as these? "When in the south, the wan moon, brooding still, Or from high points of rock looked out for fanning gales; "Sweetly ferocious, round his native walks, "The form appears of one that spurs his steed It is better to say at once that this is unmitigated rubbish; yet it is quite as good as hundreds, indeed thousands, of verses in Wordsworth's works, collected by his own hand at the mature age of sixty. How is it? Did he write all this-as it has been bluntly, but felicitously, called "perverse drivel" upon principle and in pursuit of a certain theory? Young men of twenty-three are not much troubled with theories; and least of all young poets with theories about their own compositions. Theories come later and when men are forced, or find themselves disposed, to invent theories which shall satisfactorily cover their own unsatisfactory performances; and this we shall see that Wordsworth afterwards did in a flagrant manner. But in composing the foregoing passages at twenty-three, and equally in composing passages of a like kind for an entire half century, he honestly followed the bent of his own mind and genius. It was not simply that he believed-for active conscious belief came only with increase of years, and by way of defence and defiance against the lack of public appreciation-it was not simply that he believed that every external object and every internal sensation is worthy of being celebrated in verse, and can be glorified by its instrumentality, and that nothing is too common or too vulgar for poetical treatment, but that he really did view every external object with eyes, and meditated upon every internal sensation with a reverence and a sense of importance, which people with a finer sense of proportion reserve exclusively for the greater occasions. Cows lashing their tails-cocks closing and unfurling them—a horse standing in a sunburnt intake—or, as he has him in another place, O ye gods! "cropping audibly his later meal"-really and truly appeared to Wordsworth as objects and incidents in God's world just as worthy of notice and of a hymn as the oncoming tide, the sinking sunset, or the weird uprising of the moon. Unfortunately-paradoxical as the assertion may at first sight appear-Wordsworth was all poet; and had he died at the age at which some of the greatest poets have been lifted up from life, he would, as far as this world is concerned, have been buried with mountains of feebleness piled above his head. By dint of never allowing himself, or indeed wanting, to be anything but a poet for eighty long years, he did succeed on several occasions in singing songs of exceeding beauty and worth, and on one or two occasions in evoking a strain of all but unsurpassed sublimity. But we cannot but regard this peculiar temperament of his as deeply unfortunate. It must in the long run infallibly depress his fame. To a not very distant posterity every poet necessarily becomes just as strange and foreign as to any of us is new scenery; and just as in our travels we call rather that a picturesque and delightful country which, though small, has many and constantly-occurring elevations and surprises, even of a comparatively moderate kind, than one in which we journey through leagues upon leagues of monotonous and wearisome flat, broken once or twice by a stupendous and unaccountable mountain, so, we fear, will posterity do what indeed we-almost Wordsworth's contemporaries—are beginning to do, prefer the more frequent inequalities of writers at once higher and lower than himself, to his pages upon pages of monotone and monochrome, interrupted only now and then by the loftiest diction, and only ever and anon suffused with the richest and most varying colour. Moreover, it was a misfortune to Wordsworth him |