Macaulay and Tom Moore; Lord Lytton (then Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton) steps forward to justify his bewildering admixture of sentiment and crime, remarking with charming candour:

"For in my nether heart convinced I am,
Philosophy's as good as any other bam.
But these remarks are neither here nor there.
Where was I? Oh, I see-old Southey's dead!
They'll want some bard to fill the vacant chair,
And drain the annual butt-and oh! what head
More fit with laurel to be garlanded

Than this, which, curled in many a fragrant coil,
Breathes of Castalia's streams, and best Macassar oil ?

"Yes, I am he who sung how Aram won

The gentle ear of pensive Madeline!

How love and murder hand in hand may run,
Cemented by philosophy serene,

And kisses bless the spot where gore has been!
Who breathed the melting sentiment of crime,

And for the assassin waked a sympathy divine!"

But Robert Montgomery (the author of Satan and other long forgotten poems) put in his claim :

"I fear no rival for the vacant throne;
No mortal thunder shall eclipse my own!

Let dark Macaulay chant his Roman lays,
Let Monckton Milnes go maunder for the bays,
Let Simmons call on great Napoleon's shade,
Let Lytton Bulwer seek his Aram's aid,
Let Wordsworth ask for help from Peter Bell,
Let Campbell carol Copenhagen's knell,
Let Delta warble through his Delphic groves,
Let Elliott shout for pork and penny loaves,—

I care not, I resolved to stand or fall;
One down another on, I'll smash them all!

R

"Back, ye profane! this hand alone hath power
To pluck the laurel from its sacred bower;
This brow alone is privileged to wear
The ancient wreath o'er hyacinthine hair;
These lips alone may quaff the sparkling wine,
And make its mortal juice once more divine."

There is also a parody of Tennyson's The Merman, entitled The Laureate, this was rather premature, for Wordsworth first received the laurels, as Bon Gaultier says:

66 They led our Wordsworth to the Queen, she crowned him with the bays,

And wished him many happy years, and many quarter days;

And if you'd have the story told by abler lips than mine,

You've but to call at Rydal Mount, and taste the Laureate's

wine!"

"We learn from Horace 'Homer sometimes sleeps ;'
We feel without him, Wordsworth sometimes wakes;
To show with what complacency he creeps

With his dear' waggoners' around the lakes.
He wishes for a 'boat' to sail the deeps-
Of Ocean ?-no of air; and then he makes
Another outcry for a 'little boat,'

And drivels seas to set it well afloat.

"If he must fain sweep o'er th' ethereal plain,
And Pegasus runs restive in his 'waggon,'
Could he not beg the loan of Charles's wain?
Or pray Medea for a single dragon?

Or if too classic for his vulgar brain,

He fear'd his neck to venture such a nag on,
And he must needs mount nearer to the moon,
Could not the blockhead ask for a balloon?

"Pedlars' and 'Boats' and 'Waggons!' Oh, ye shades
Of Pope and Dryden has it come to this?
That trash of such sort not alone evades
Contempt, but from the bathos' vast abyss
Floats scum-like uppermost, and these Jack Cades
Of sense and song above your graves may hiss-
The 'little boatman' and his 'Peter Bell'

Can sneer at him who drew Achitophel!"-BYRON.

WORDSWORTH held the title, and drew the pension of Poet Laureate, but whether he was worthy of either will

probably remain undecided as long as any other debatable questions in Literature or Art; it is purely a matter of taste, and the admirers of Wordsworth, though energetic in his praise, are but few in number.

His apologists are usually so extreme in their views, that they injure the cause they fight for; it is not an easy task to persuade people that mere commonplace remarks, and trite simple reflections, conveyed in very blank verse, contain the highest attributes of poetry, and that grandeur of language and dignity of sentiment are, or ought to be, obsolete. Yet this is, to a certain extent, an epitome of their arguments, and Sir John Coleridge, in a lecture he delivered at Exeter not long since, having commenced by stating that Wordsworth was not so popular a poet as many others he considered less worthy, proceeded to sum up the total of Wordsworth's power in a passage full of bare assertion, and most inconsequential reasoning:

"Wordsworth, it is true, is probably now, by most cultivated and intellectual men, admitted to be a great and original writer; a writer whose compositions it is right to be acquainted with as a part of literary history and literary education. Few men would now venture to deny him genius, or to treat his poetry with contempt. No one probably would dare to echo or even to defend the ribald abuse of the Edinburgh Review. But he is not generally appreciated; even now he is far too little read; and, as I think, for the idlest and weakest of all reasons. He suffers still from the impression produced by attacks made upon him by men who, I should suppose, if they had tried, were incapable of feeling his beauty and his grandeur, but who seem to me never to have had the common honesty to try. Fastening upon a few obvious defects, seizing upon a few poems (poems admitting of complete defence, and, viewed rightly, full of beauty, yet capable no doubt of being presented in a ridiculous aspect), the critics of the Edinburgh Review poured out on Wordsworth abuse, invective, malignant personality, which deterred the unreflecting mass of men from reading for themselves and finding

out, as they must have found out, the worthlessness of the criticism. They destroyed his popularity and blighted his reputation, though they have had no power whatever over his fame. Lord Jeffrey was the chief offender in this matter. . . . But the sentence of the critic either suspended men's judgments or overbore them, and the poems were unread. The power of The Edinburgh Review of those days, written as it was by a set of men of splendid and popular abilities, was indeed prodigious. It stopped for years the sale of Wordsworth's poems; and though he outlived its calumnies, and found at length a general and reverent acceptance, yet prejudices were created which impeded his popularity; and even now the echoes of Lord Jeffrey's mocking laughter fill the ears of many men, and deafen them to the lovely and majestic melody of Wordsworth's song."

The simple fact is that Wordsworth's poetry did not attract the public, and probably never will. Articles which appeared in The Edinburgh Review forty years ago are not now very easy to obtain, and cannot, at the present time, influence public opinion to any appreciable extent. Hostile criticism often has a very decided effect at the time it is written, but that effect is, as a rule, only temporary if the criticism is unjust. Were ever men more bitterly, savagely, and unjustly treated by the reviewers than Byron, Shelley, and Keats, upon whom ridicule, personal abuse, and political spite were unsparingly showered? Yet can it be supposed that their works are now any the less read and admired than if they had not been so abused.

Whatever

Wordsworth's poems are easy of access. beauties they ever possessed can still be found in them, all the adverse criticism in the world cannot have altered one syllable of what was written, and yet the public refuses to be enthusiastic, notwithstanding all that Sir John Coleridge asserts about the power and genius of Wordsworth, and the terrible results of Jeffrey's mocking laughter.