on as a premium and
_solatium_ to himself for any extra hauteur. This gracious style of
intercourse, already favourable to a tone of conversation more liberal
and unreserved than would else have been conceded to a vagrant huckster,
was further improved by the fact that the pedlar was also the main
retailer of news. Here it was that a real advantage offered itself to
any mind having that philosophic interest in human characters,
struggles, and calamities, which is likely enough to arise amongst a
class of men contemplating long records of chance and change through
their wanderings, and so often left to their own meditations upon them
by long tracts of solitude. The gossip of the neighbouring districts,
whether tragic or comic, would have a natural interest from its
locality. And such records would lead to illustration from other cases
more remote--losing the interest of neighbourhood, but compensating that
loss by their deeper intrinsic hold upon the sensibilities. Ladies of
the highest rank would suffer their reserve to thaw in such interviews;
besides that, before unresisting humility and inferiority too apparent
even haughtiness the most intractable usually abates its fervour.

Coleridge also allows himself, for the sake of argument, not merely to
assume too hastily, but to magnify too inordinately. Daniel, the poet,
really _was_ called the 'well-languaged' (p. 83, vol. ii.), but by whom?
Not, as Hooker was called the 'judicious,' or Bede the 'venerable,' by
whole generations; but by an individual. And as to the epithet of
'prosaic,' we greatly doubt if so much as one individual ever connected
it with Daniel's name.

But the whole dispute on Poetic Diction is too deep and too broad for an
occasional or parenthetic notice. It is a dispute which renews itself in
every cultivated language;[50] and even, in its application to different
authors within the same language, as for instance, to Milton, to
Shakspeare, or to Wordsworth, it takes a special and varied aspect.
Declining this, as far too ample a theme, we wish to say one word, but
an urgent word and full of clamorous complaint, upon the other branch.
This dispute, however, is but one of two paths upon which the
Biographical Literature approaches the subject of Wordsworth: the other
lies in the direct critical examination of Wordsworth's poems. As to
this, we wish to utter one word, but a word full of clamorous complaint.
That the criticisms of Coleridge on William W