in the shape of poetry that is despicably
mean; mistaking it all the while for the excellent; Milton trifles
seldom, and knows full well when he is trifling; Wordsworth has
sometimes entangled himself with a poetic system; Milton no more than
Samson will permit withes, however green, or a cart-rope, however new,
to imprison his giant arms; Wordsworth has borrowed nothing, but timidly
and jealously saved himself from theft by flight; Milton has maintained
his originality, even while he borrows--he has dared to snatch the Urim
and Thummim from the high-priest's breast, and inserted them among his
own native ornaments, where they shine in keeping--unbedimming and
unbedimmed; Wordsworth's prose is but a feeble counterpoise to his
poetry; whereas Milton's were itself sufficient to perpetuate his name;
Wordsworth's sonnets are, perhaps, equal to Milton's, some of his "Minor
Poems" may approach "Lycidas," and "Il Penseroso," but where a whole like
"Paradise Lost?"

Thus while Wordsworth has left a name, the memory of a character and
many works, which shall illustrate the age when he lived, and exalt him,
on the whole, above all Britain's bards of that period, Milton is
identified with the glory, not of an age, but of all ages; with the
progress of liberty in the world--with the truth and grandeur of the
Christian faith and with the honor and dignity of the human species
itself. Wordsworth burns like the bright star Arcturus, outshining the
fainter orbs of the constellation to which it belongs. Milton is one of
those solitary oceans of flame, which seem to own but a dim and far-off
relationship to aught else but the Great Being, who called them into
existence. So truly did the one appreciate the other when he sung

"Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart."

RATS AND RAT-KILLERS IN ENGLAND

A rat! a rat! dead for a ducat.--_Hamlet_.

There is nothing like being in earnest when one begins a good work. So,
evidently, thinks the author of a blue-covered pamphlet just issued,
with a title page headed by three words and nine notes of
exclamation--Rat!!! Rat!!! Rat!!! The object of the writer is no less
than to alarm the whole nation by showing what we lose every year by the
animals against whom he has made such a dead set. Not content with
dilating on this fact in the body of his work, he puts what he calls "a
startling fact," upon the blue wrapper. "One pair of rats," he says,
"with their progeny, will produc