flimsy hollow fellow; I am made of more solid materials.

"The poet was followed by an orator. He put up Demosthenes and Cicero on my right and left, and instituted a society here for the cultivation of eloquence. Many were the discussions which I witnessed in this reign. Upon one occasion, indeed, my very existence was threatened; for the subject in dispute was, • Shall Homer be burnt?' There was every probability that the question would be decided in the affirmative, when the President rescued me from my executioners, and locked me up in a closet with his rolls and butter. The next day a violent political debate took place, which, after raging with unremitting violence for two hours, was dissolved in the following manner. The whole body

of members started from their seats, as if by instinct, overturned the furniture, demolished the windows, hurled cinders, snuffers, jugs, tongs, pokers, &c. at the President's head, to the utter subversion of his authority, and the imminent danger of his person. Cicero and Demosthenes perished in the fray. You will not be surprised to learn that after this the Parliament was dissolved.

"The next inhabitant of this abode was a hard drinker. I was terribly handled by this monster. He cut off my nose, because I deprived Polyphemus of an eye; and flung a pewter vessel at my cranium, because he thought fit to misconstrue the words

66 Ου ποτ' ένι”

Not any pot.

I was very glad when this gentleman left me. He mutilated me as cruelly as a commentator, and I hated him almost as bitterly.

"His successor behaved to me in a much more becoming manner. He belonged to the race of Dandies,

who were springing up very rapidly at this period. To be sure, he offended my eyes too often by the sight of my works deprived of their binding, and disgraced by pencilled annotations; and, in an equal degree, he offended my olfactory nerves by a bottle of Eau de Cologne, which he set up by my side. But in the main

he was civil and inoffensive. He made to me a most studied inclination of his body every morning, before he completed his toilet; but whether his devotion was occasioned by my description of his prototype Paris, or by his Parisian attachment to the mirror which is suspended over my head, I cannot take upon me to determine. He used such a variety of unguents, that, before his departure, I smelt of the oil, from necessity, almost as much as my friend Virgil does from inclination.

"I believe these are all the gentlemen who have inhabited this chamber since I was appointed the guardian of it. I presume it will be uninteresting to you to learn the changes which have taken place in the paper of the room, its chairs, or its carpeting. Various were the tastes of its possessors; and various, of course, were the improvements they introduced. You, Sir, are now the occupier of the apartment, and, without flattery, I have no reason, as yet, to be dissatisfied with you. You have brought me into very good company; yet I must say Virgil is apt to give himself airs, and, though nobody has less vanity than myself, I am sometimes vexed at hearing Milton ranked above me. By-the-by, you clapped a sprig of laurel on Milton's head the other day. I say nothing!--but at your age, Sir! methinks you might have known where such a decoration was due."

Here ends the manuscript. We certainly have one reason which induces us most strongly to attribute it to the Spirit of Homer. Whoever has read of Calypso, of the Syrens, and the Lostrygones, must be aware of the

old gentleman's propensity to fiction. Now our MS. does decidedly in this point bear marks of Homeric manufacture, for we have little doubt that it is, like the Odyssey,-All a Hum!

ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY.

TO RICHARD HODGSON, KNAVE OF CLUBS, &c. &c.

MY DEAR SEC.—I now come to the latter department of my humble vindication of William Wordsworth's Poems, in which I proposed to myself to take notice of those other ingredients of matter or style, which are, or are supposed to be, peculiarly characteristic of those productions. But before I proceed any farther, I must here remark, that the distinction which I have apparently created between Wordsworth as a poet generally, and the same as a poet in a sense peculiar to himself, is in reality little better than imaginary; the whole of his Poems, from the shortest to the longest, from the most humble to the most impassioned, being composed strictly upon the principles of one grand comprehensive system; and consequently the extracts in my first letter being just as thoroughly and genuinely the offsprings of that system as any thing which I may think it right to quote hereafter in this my second. The real foundation of the distinction, if any, is this, that the class of Poetry from which those quotations were made is one, with the external dress of which the world is commonly entertained in the writings of others; whereas a few specimens, which I shall take the liberty of presenting to your readers in this essay, will be either the living impressions produced on the heart and the mind by common incidents and natural

objects, or they will be the emanations of impassioned feelings, deep thought, and high imagination, and which imperiously demand from the Reader a corresponding sensibility, and an associated temper of the affections, without which much of the most exalted poetry in the world must of necessity appear dead and meaningless phraseology, from the simple cause that the Reader is himself not sufficiently alive to perceive or be animated by the life that is before him. The motto and defence of all original thinkers must be, and ever has been, "Intelligibilia, non Intellectum fero."

Having premised thus much, to guard against misapprehension, I now enter upon the particular subject of this letter, namely, the principles which are the foundation as well as the pervading spirit of Wordsworth's Poems. And here I have to lament the utter impossibility of doing any thing like justice to my cause within the narrow limits which necessity imposes on me; though certainly it is some consolation to remember that even Wordsworth himself, with all the eagerness of an advocate, and all his own nervous and fervid eloquence, has finished an exposition of his system with confessing that he found a full and satisfying developement of his principles impracticable within the space allowed him in a Preface. What the Poet himself has left undone, I will not presume to fulfil, but will rather content myself by mentioning one or two of the grand creative articles of his faith, upon which every thing he has written is built up, and which, if duly attended to, will lead us, without fear of wandering, into the hidden and wonderful abysses of his thoughts, and the treasure-house of his imagination.

This Poet, then, in the first place, is a lover of Nature; not a blind confounder of the Creator with his own creation—not a soulless grovelling worshipper of the earth without even the supposition of a Providence ;none of these,—but a genuine, pure, religious lover of

the Universe, from an ardent belief that it is the symbol and visible exponent of the immeasurable wisdom, and goodness, and majesty of that Almighty God, who is, and was, and is to come. Penetrated, as he himself says, "to his heart of hearts," with this living idea, he can pass by in-neglect or contempt no component part of this mysterious whole; he denies not to any being, animate or inanimate, its due share of his love; he recognizes in all and singular of the infinite germs of the Universe, the finger and the impress of a superior Being; in winter or summer, in storm or sunshine, in solitudes or in crowds, in joy or affliction, he is still one and the same; ever extracting from human contingencies their universal essence; ever inspiring, in return, his own passionate and blended sympathies, whilst he chastens, subdues, and purifies every thought and every wish by a spirit of unutterable and boundless love. It follows intimately, from the foregoing convictions, that no natural object or incident (with obvious and manifest exceptions) can be too low or insignificant for poetry; nay, to carry the principle to its legitimate length, that not seldom in rustic life the passions are more vigorous and decisive, the moving springs of thought and action more simple and unelaborate, and the whole system of society more genuine and unadulterated, than when encumbered and concealed by forms of city ceremonial, and deadened by the depraving habitude of perpetual though unconscious deceit. Low life, therefore, is not destitute of admirable materials for poetry; and this particularly, when it is, as is usually the case, associated with the beautiful and sublime of Nature: but these are only the rude materials of poetry; they cannot become poetry itself, unless they are arranged, and modified, and combined by the fancy; and, above all, impregnated and shaped by the imagination of the Poet. To express what I mean more clearly by examples, I would intreat my readers to recall to their minds for a few moments the "Tam