in hearing him speak on this subject, that you saw Titian's picture of
the meeting of _Bacchus and Ariadne_--so classic were his conceptions,
so glowing his style. Milton is his great idol, and he sometimes dares
to compare himself with him. His Sonnets, indeed, have something of the
same high-raised tone and prophetic spirit. Chaucer is another prime
favourite of his, and he has been at the pains to modernise some of the
Canterbury Tales. Those persons who look upon Mr. Wordsworth as a merely
puerile writer, must be rather at a loss to account for his strong
predilection for such geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo. We do not
think our author has any very cordial sympathy with Shakespear. How
should he? Shakespear was the least of an egotist of any body in the
world. He does not much relish the variety and scope of dramatic
composition. "He hates those interlocutions between Lucius and Caius."
Yet Mr. Wordsworth himself wrote a tragedy when he was young; and we
have heard the following energetic lines quoted from it, as put into the
mouth of a person smit with remorse for some rash crime:

----"Action is momentary,
The motion of a muscle this way or that;
Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite!"

Perhaps for want of light and shade, and the unshackled spirit of the
drama, this performance was never brought forward. Our critic has a
great dislike to Gray, and a fondness for Thomson and Collins. It is
mortifying to hear him speak of Pope and Dryden, whom, because they have
been supposed to have all the possible excellences of poetry, he will
allow to have none. Nothing, however, can be fairer, or more amusing,
than the way in which he sometimes exposes the unmeaning verbiage of
modern poetry. Thus, in the beginning of Dr. Johnson's _Vanity of Human
Wishes_--

"Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru"--

he says there is a total want of imagination accompanying the words,
the same idea is repeated three times under the disguise of a different
phraseology: it comes to this--"let _observation_, with extensive
_observation, observe_ mankind;" or take away the first line, and the
second,

"Survey mankind from China to Peru,"

literally conveys the whole. Mr. Wordsworth is, we must say, a perfect
Drawcansir as to prose writers. He complains of the dry reasoners and
matter-of-fact people for their want of _passion_; and he is jealous of
the rhetorical declaimers and rhapsodis