ry
young man in 1818, the date of the earliest of the Wordsworth papers, he
was a young writer), that of practised and unrestrained vigour (for 1832
represents about his literary zenith), and that of reflective decadence,
for by 1842 he had ceased to write habitually, and was already bowed
down by mental sorrows and physical ailments.

In the first paper, or set of papers, it is evident that he is
ambitiously groping after a more systematic style of criticism than he
found in practice to be possible for him. Although he elsewhere scoffs
at definitions, he tries to formulate very precisely the genius of
Scott, of Byron, and of Wordsworth; he does his best to connect his
individual judgments with these formulas; he shuns mere verbal
criticism, and (to some extent) mere exaltation or depreciation of
particular passages. But it is quite evident that he is ill at ease; and
I do not think that any one now reading the essay can call it a
successful one, or can attempt to rank it with those which, from
different points of view, Hazlitt and De Quincey (Hazlitt nearly at the
same time) wrote about Wordsworth. Indeed, Hazlitt is the most valuable
of all examples for a critical comparison with Wilson; both being
violent partisans and crotcheteers, both being animated with the truest
love of poetry, but the one possessing and the other lacking the
"tie-beam" of a consistent critical theory.

A dozen years later Wilson had cast his slough, and had become the
autocratic, freespoken, self-constituted dictator, Christopher North. He
was confronted with the very difficult problem of Mr. Tennyson's poems.
He knew they were poetry; that he could not help seeing and knowing. But
they seemed to him to be the work of a "cockney" (it would be
interesting to know whether there ever was any one less of a cockney
than the author of "Mariana"), and he was irritated by some silly praise
which had been given to them. So he set to work, and perpetrated the
queerest jumble of sound and unsound criticism that exists in the
archives of that art, so far as a humble but laborious student and
practitioner thereof knoweth. He could not for the life of him help
admiring "Adeline," "Oriana," "Mariana," "The Ode to Memory." Yet he had
nothing but scorn for the scarcely less exquisite "Mermaid" and "Sea
Fairies"--though the first few lines of the latter, excluded by this and
other pseudo-criticism from the knowledge of half a generation of
English readers, eq