they owed it (for in all cases the _moral_ spirit is a
great illuminator of the _intellect_), they have reaped the most
enviable reward, in the hatred of traitors and Jacobins all over the
world: and in the expressions of that hatred we find their names
frequently coupled. There was a time, however, when these names were
coupled for other purposes: they were coupled as joint supporters of a
supposed new creed in relation to their own art. Mr. Wordsworth, it is
well known to men of letters, did advance a new theory upon two great
questions of art: in some points it might perhaps be objected that his
faith, in relation to that which he attacked, was as the Protestant
faith to the Catholic--_i.e._, not a new one, but a restoration of the
primitive one purified from its modern corruptions. Be this as it may,
however, Mr. Wordsworth's exposition of his theory is beyond all
comparison the subtlest and (not excepting even the best of the German
essays) the most finished and masterly specimen of reasoning which has
in any age or nation been called forth by any one of the fine arts. No
formal attack has yet been made upon it, except by Mr. Coleridge; of
whose arguments we need not say that they furnish so many centres (as it
were) to a great body of metaphysical acuteness; but to our judgment
they fail altogether of overthrowing Mr. Wordsworth's theory. All the
other critics have shown in their casual allusions to this theory that
they have not yet come to understand what is its drift or main thesis.
Such being the state of their acquaintance with the theory itself, we
need not be surprised to find that the accidental connection between Mr.
Wordsworth and the Laureate arising out of friendship and neighbourhood
should have led these blundering critics into the belief that the two
poets were joint supporters of the same theory: the fact being meanwhile
that in all which is peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth's theory, Mr. Southey
dissents perhaps as widely and as determinately as Mr. Coleridge;
dissents, that is to say, not as the numerous blockheads among the male
blue-stockings who dignify their ignorance with the name of dissent--but
as one man of illustrious powers dissents from what he deems after long
examination the errors of another; as Leibnitz on some occasions
dissented from Plato, or as the great modern philosopher of Germany
occasionally dissents from Leibnitz. That which Mr. Wordsworth has in
common with all great poets, Mr.