showed how little he cared for them. Southey said, to let him into a fine library was like turning a bear into a tulip garden; and De Quincey tells of his cutting open a 'pracht-edition' of Burke with a knife he had just used to butter toast. What a contrast his pious remorse at the ravage of the nut-bough— I felt a sense of pain when I beheld The silent trees, and the intruding sky; and the earnest reverence of the exhortation that follows: Then, dearest maiden! move along these shades In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand We have left ourselves no space to speak of the poet's later political opinions. It is well known that they were of what is called a high Tory complexion-especially that he looked with no favourable eye on the sort of education that has been latterly spreading among the poor; that he extremely disliked dissent, and disapproved of modern concession to it; that he anticipated the most disastrous consequences from the Catholic Emancipation and Reform Bills. He passed, in fact, apparently from one pole to the other of the political sphere, just as his friends Southey and Coleridge did, and under the influence of like causes, the chief of which was undoubtedly the strong national feeling that was roused in them all by Napoleon's strides of conquest, and the danger that at one time seemed to threaten England. The violence and crimes of the Jacobins had before this alienated their sympathies from the French Revolution. They, men of thought and feeling, not men of experience and action, had dreamt of a rosewater revolution, and sickened at blood. At first, they merely stood aloof, displeased equally at the proceedings of the French and at our declaration of war. But when danger came near 'the inviolate island of the brave and free,' they not only felt as Englishmen and as patriots, but looked upon their country as the last citadel and stronghold of liberty; and henceforth war to the knife with France was identical with devotion to freedom and virtue. During the whole war with Napoleon, the Whigs did what they dared to thwart its continuance, and to annoy those who carried it on, and so became to a degree identified with the enemies of the country. This is the feeling that lay originally at the bottom of Wordsworth's dislike of them. Then, again, he never was at heart a democrat. Like Milton, he would have had an aristocracy of intellect and virtue. There is not a trace of the feeling, that numbers should outweigh worth from beginning to end of his writings. He had, besides, a strong distaste for city life, for its endless bustle, and its dull routine, animated as he thought by vanity and the desire of wealth. Commerce, trade, and manufactures were not, in his estimation, the sources of a nation's greatness; but on country life, its occupations, its traditions, and its customs he looked with a fond affection, especially on that national church which so associates itself to the senses, the imagination, and the understanding with a country life. The village spire and the squire's mansion are the centres of this life, and Wordsworth's passion for nature could scarcely have failed to throw something of a poetic lustre, in addition to the value his reason and his heart attached to them, over the institutions of which both were symbols. His early association with Coleridge, too, tended to open to him the deep foundations on which our national institutions rest, and to inspire him with a reverence for them, and a cautious fear of weakening them by attempts at improvement. If, however, any person is inclined to call him reactionist and bigot, we would only remark that there are three classes of politicians,-those who under the pressure of an existing evil seek for change, without the faculty of discerning to what that change will inevitably lead; ignorant, in fact, of the law of development which links together political events and gives unity to History;-those who, with conscious and definite aim, plant the great hereafter in the now, and are not consequently liable to be startled and terrified, and driven into reaction by the results of their own actions;—and thirdly, those who with clear eye discern the dependence of the hereafter upon the now, and because they shrink from the hereafter, refuse to take the step which renders it inevitably certain. To the last class belonged William Wordsworth. Fraser's Magazine, July and August, 1851. POETRY AND CRITICISM. DR. JOHNSON, in more than a century and a half of English literary history, beginning with Cowley and ending with Gray, found less than threescore writers in verse whom he deemed worthy of a place in his biographical collection. Though, in his own line, and in cases where partiality did not disturb his judgment, a tolerably correct arbiter of literary reputation, the Doctor would find hard work to persuade any well-read person of the present day, that more than half the verse-writers whose lives he has composed have any claim to be called poets, or even men of distinguished talents. Perhaps the account might be balanced by the addition to his list of as many names as a modern judgment of the literary celebrities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would erase from it. We have learned to look for other qualities in those we honour |