Marruzw Axxoxp justly holds a high position as a critic, Were we asked to express in one sentence the main characteristic of his criticism, that sentence would probably be that—they are absolutely free from cant. He indulges in no inflated collocations of words, which, when reduced to their monosyllabic equivalents, turn out to be cither identical propositions, or more frequently mere incoherent blasts from an ovendistended windbag. He speaks the words of soberness even when people who differ from him deny that he speaks the words of truth. In the July Macmillan, he opens the budget with an article on Wordsworth, mildly deprecatory, calmly appreciative, but mainly designed to rescue the poet from the oblivion into which he is rapidly falling. Few except the most bigoted of Wordsworthians will agree with the judgtnent that "the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakspeare and Milton, undoubtedly the most considerable in our Language from the Elizabethan age to the present time his name deserves to stand, and will finally stand, above Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelly, Keats," and so with all the poets of France, Germany and Italy since the death: of Molitre, and excepting Goethe only. These be brave words, and we cannot find that the writer of them even attempts to justify them, There is a test, rude, but effective in its way, which at once proves whether a poet has or has not obtained a hold on men's minds and affections, That is the test of quotation. There is, we believe, no single passage in the great mass of poetry and cadenced prose which, under the name of poetry, Wordsworth wrote within the sixty years of his literary activity, that would if quoted among a group of twenty cultivated Englishmen be at once recognised by all or by half of them. Now Wordsworth's best work confessedly dates from seventy years ago, an ample period for
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.