"How would my admirable brother, the Rev. Abraham Plymley, like to be marched to a Catholic chapel, to be sprinkled with the sanctified contents of a pump, to hear a number of false quantities in the Latin tongue, and to see a number of persons occupied in making right angles upon the breast and forehead? And if all this would give you so much pain, what right have you to march Catholic soldiers to a place of worship, where there is no aspersion, no rectangular gestures, and where they understand every word they hear, having first, in order to get him to enlist, made a solemn promise to the contrary? Can you wonder, after this, that the Catholic priest stops the recruiting in Ireland, as he is now doing to a most alarming degree?"

The influence of these three writers has been extensive, and vigorously beneficial-placing their politics out of the question. Their aqua fortis and “laughing gas" have exercised alike a purificatory office; their championship has been strong on the side of social ameliorations and happy progress. The deep importance of national education on a proper system has been finely advocated by each in his peculiar way-Sydney Smith by excessive ridicule of the old and present system; Fonblanque by administering a moral cane and caustic to certain pastors and masters and ignorant pedagogues of all kinds; and Jerrold by such tales as the "Lives of Brown, Jones, and Robinson," (in vol. ii. of "Cakes and Ale,") and by various essays. If in the conflict of parties the Rev. Sydney Smith and Mr. Fonblanque have once or twice been sharply handled, they might reasonably have expected much worse. As for vague accusations of levity and burlesque, and want of "a well-regulated mind," and trifling and folly, those things are always said of all such men. It is observable that very dull men and men incapable of wit-either in themselves, or of the comprehension of it in others-invariably call every witty man, and every witty saying, which is not quite agreeable to themselves, by the term flippant. Let the wits and humourists be consoled; they have the best of it, and the dull ones know it.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AND LEIGH HUNT.

"I judge him for a rectified spirit,
By many revolutions of discourse,

(In his bright reason's influence) refined

From all the tartarous moods of common men;
Bearing the nature and similitude

Of a right heavenly body; most severe

In fashion and collection of himself;

And, then, as clear and confident as Jove."-BEN JONSON.

"You will see H-t; one of those happy souls

Which are the salt o' the earth, and without whom

This world would smell like what it is-a tomb."-SHELLEY.

"Most debonnaire, in courtesy supreme;

Loved of the mean, and honoured by the great;
Ne'er dashed by Fortune, nor cast down by Fate;

To present and to after times a theme."-DRUMMOND.

THESе two laurelled veterans, whose lives are clad with the eternal youth of poesy, have been so long before the public, and their different and contrasted claims may be thought to have been so thoroughly settled, that it will, perhaps, as a first impression, be considered that there was no necessity for including them in this work. They are, however, introduced as highly important connecting links between past and present periods; as the outlivers of many storms; the originators of many opinions and tastes; the sufferers of odium, partly for their virtues, and in some respects for their perversities; and the long wounded but finally victorious experiencers of popular changes of mind during many years. If, therefore, it should still be thought that nothing very new remains to be said of them, it is submitted that at leas there are some truths concerning both, which have neve. yet been fairly brought into public notice.

When Mr. Wordsworth first stood before the worl as a poet, he might as well, for the sorriness of his re ception, have stood before the world as a prophet. In some such position, perhaps, it may be said he actually did stand; and he had prophet's fare in a shower of stones. For several generations, had the cadences of our poets (so called) moved to them along the ends of their fingers. Their language had assumed a conven

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tional elegance, spreading smoothly into pleonasms or clipped nicely into elisions. The point of an antithesis had kept perpetual sentry upon the final pause ;' and while a spurious imagination made a Name stand as a personification, Observation only looked out of window ("with extensive view," indeed. . " from China to Peru!") and refused very positively to take a step out of doors. A long and dreary decline of poetry it was, from the high-rolling sea of Dryden, or before Dryden, when Waller first began to improve" (bona verba !) our versification-down to the time of Wordsworth. Milton's far-off voice, in the meantime, was a trumpet, which the singing birds could not take a note from: his genius was a lone island in a remote sea, and singularly uninfluential on his contemporaries and immediate successors. The decline sloped on. And that edition of the poets which was edited by Dr. Johnson for popular uses, and in which he and his publishers did advisedly obliterate from the chronicles of the people, every poet before Cowley, and force the Chaucers, Spencers, and Draytons to give place to "Pomfret's Choice" and the "Art of Cookery,"-is a curious proof of poetical and critical degradation. Every child is graceful," observes Sir Joshua Reynolds, with a certain amount of truth, "until he has learnt to dance." We had learned to dance with a vengeance-we could not move except we danced-the French school pirouetted in us most anti-nationally. The age of Shakspeare and our great ancestral writers had grown to be rococo-they were men of genius and deficient in taste,' but we were wits and classics-we exceeded in civilization, and wore wigs. It was not, however, to end so.

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Looking back to the experiences of nations, a national literature is seldom observed to recover its voice after an absolute declension; the scattered gleaners may be singing in the stubble, but the great song of the harvest sounds but once. Into the philosophy of this fact it would take too much space to enquire. That genius comes as a periodical effluence, and in dependence on unmanifest causes, is the confession of grave thinkers, rather than fanciful speculators; and perhaps if the Roman empire, for instance, could have endured in strength, and held its mighty breath until the next tide, some Latin writer would have emerged from the onward flood of inspiration which was bearing Dante to

the world's wide shores. Unlike Dante, indeed, would have been that writer-for no author, however influential on his contemporaries, can be perfectly independent himself of their influences-but he would have been a Latin writer, and his hexameters worth waiting for. And England did not wait in vain for a new effluence of genius-it came at last like the morning-a pale light in the sky, an awakening bird, and a sunburst-we had Cowper-we had Burns-that lark of the new grey dawn; and presently the early-risers of the land could see to spell slowly out the name of William Wordsworth. They saw and read it clearly with those of Coleridge and Leigh Hunt,—and subsequently of Shelley and Keats, notwithstanding the dazzling beams of lurid power which were in full radiation from the engrossing name of Byron.

Mr. Wordsworth began his day with a dignity and determination of purpose, which might well have startled the public and all its small poets and critics, his natural enemies. He laid down fixed principles in his prefaces, and carried them out with rigid boldness, in his poems; and when the world laughed, he bore it well, for his logic apprized him of what should follow : nor was he without the sympathy of Coleridge and a few other first-rate intellects. With a severe hand he tore away from his art the encumbering artifices of his predecessors; and he walked upon the pride of criticism with greater pride. No toleration would he extend to the worst laws of a false critical code; nor any conciliation to the critics who had enforced them. He was a

poet, and capable of poetry, he thought, only as he was a man and faithful to his humanity. He would not separate poetry and nature, even in their forms. Instead of being "classical" and a "wit," he would be a poet and a man, and “like a man,” (notwithstanding certain weak moments) he spoke out bravely, in language free of the current phraseology and denuded of conventional adornments, the thought which was in him. And the thought and the word witnessed to that verity of nature, which is eternal with variety. He laid his hand upon the Pegasean mane, and testified that it was not floss silk. He testified that the ground was not all lawn or bowlinggreen; and that the forest trees were not clipped upon a pattern. He scorned to be contented with a tradition of beauty, or with an abstraction of the beautiful. He

refused to work, as others had done, like those sculptors, who make all their noses in the fashion of that of the Medicæan Venus; until no one has his own nose; nature being "cut to order." William Wordsworth would accept no type for nature: he would take no leap at the generalization of the natural; and the brown moss upon the pale should be as sacred to him and acceptable to his song, as the pine-clothed mountain. He is a poet of detail, and sings of what is closest to his eye; as small starting points for far views, deep sentiment, and comprehensive speculation. "The neanest flower that blows" is not too mean for him; exactly because "thoughts too deep for tears" lie for him in the mystery of its meanness. He has proved this honour on the universe; that in its meanest natural thing is no vulgarism, unconveyed by the artificiality of human manners. That such a principle should lead to some puerilities at the outset, was not surprising.

A minute observer of exterior nature, his humanity seems nevertheless to stand between it and him; and he confounds those two lives-not that he loses himself in the contemplation of things, but that he absorbs them in himself, and renders them Wordsworthian. They are not what he wishes, until he has brought them home to his own heart. Chaucer and Burns made the most of a daisy, but left it still a daisy; Mr. Wordsworth leaves it transformed into his thoughts. This is the sublime of egotism, disinterested as extreme. It is on the entity of the man Wordsworth, that the vapour creeps along the hill-and "the mountains are a feeling." To use the language of the German schools, he makes a subjectivity of his objectivity. Beyond the habits and purposes of his individuality, he cannot carry his sympathies; and of all powerful writers, he is the least dramatic. Another reason, however, for his dramatic inaptitude, is his deficiency in passion. He is passionate in his will and reason, but not in his senses and affections; and perhaps scarcely in his fancy and imagination. He has written, however, one of the noblest odes in the English language, in his “Recollections of Childhood;" and his chief poem, "The Excursion," which is only a portion of a larger work (to be published hereafter) called "The Recluse," has passages of very glorious exaltation. Still, he is seldom impulsive; and his exaltation is rather the nobly-acquired habit of his