*

He mentioned incidentally that the spelling of our language was very
much fixed in the time of Charles the Second, and that the attempts
which had been made since, and are being made in the present day, were
not likely to succeed. He entered his protest as usual against
[Carlyle's] style, and said that since Johnson no writer had done so
much to vitiate the English language. He considers Lord Chesterfield the
last good English writer before Johnson. Then came the Scotch
historians, who did infinite mischief to style, with the exception of
Smollett, who wrote good pure English. He quite agreed to the saying
that all great poets wrote good prose; he said there was not one
exception. He does not think Burns's prose equal to his verse, but this
he attributes to his writing his letters in English words, while in his
verse he was not trammelled in this way, but let his numbers have their
own way.

_Lancrigg, November_.--Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth took an early dinner with
us on the 26th of this month. He was very vigorous, and spoke of his
majority at Glasgow, also of his reception at Oxford. He told us of an
application he had just had from a Glasgow publisher that he should
write a sonnet in praise of Fergusson and Allan Ramsay, to prefix to a
new edition of those Poets which was about to appear. He intended to
reply, that Burns's lines to Fergusson would be a much more appropriate
tribute than anything he could write; and he went on to say that Burns
owed much to Fergusson, and that he had taken the plan of many of his
poems from Fergusson, and the measure also. He did not think this at all
detracted from the merit of Burns, for he considered it a much higher
effort of genius to excel in degree, than to strike out what may be
called an original poem. He spoke highly of the purity of language of
the Scotch poets of an earlier period, Gavin Douglass and others, and
said that they greatly excelled the English poets, after Chaucer, which
he attributed to the distractions of England during the wars of York and
Lancaster.

_December 25th_, 1846.--My mother and I called at Rydal Mount yesterday
early, to wish our dear friends the blessings of the season. Mrs. W. met
us at the door most kindly, and we found him before his good fire in the
dining-room, with a flock of robins feasting at the window. He had an
old tattered book in his hand; and as soon as he had given us a cordial
greeting, he said, in a most animated manner, 'I