ed by the general public and by a few of its
critical guides with storms of obloquy and ridicule; but Wordsworth,
though never indifferent to criticism, was severely disdainful of it,
and held on his way. From the first the brightest spirits of England had
been his passionate though by no means always undiscriminating admirers;
and about the end of the first quarter of the century the public began
to come round. Oxford, always first to recognise, if not always first to
produce, the greatest achievements of English literature, gave him its
D.C.L. in 1839. He received a pension of L300 a year in 1842 from Sir
Robert Peel, who, unlike most English Prime Ministers, cared for men of
letters; the laureateship fell to him in right of right on Southey's
death in 1843, and he died on the 23rd of April 1850, having come to
fourscore years almost without labour, and without many heavy sorrows.

Of his character not much need be said. Like that of Milton, whom he in
many ways resembled (they had even both, as Hartley Coleridge has
pointed out, brothers named Christopher), it was not wholly amiable, and
the defects in it were no doubt aggravated by his early condition (for
it must be remembered that till he was two and thirty his prospects were
of the most disquieting character), by the unjust opposition which the
rise of his reputation met with, and by his solitary life in contact
only with worshipping friends and connections. One of these very
worshippers confesses that he was "inhumanly arrogant"; and he was also,
what all arrogant men are not, rude. He was entirely self-centred, and
his own circle of interests and tastes was not wide. It is said that he
would cut books with a buttery knife, and after that it is probably
unnecessary to say any more, for the fact "surprises by itself" an
indictment of almost infinite counts.

But his genius is not so easily despatched. I have said that it is now
as a whole universally recognised, and I cannot but think that Mr.
Matthew Arnold was wrong when he gave a contrary opinion some fifteen
years ago. He must have been biassed by his own remembrance of earlier
years, when Wordsworth was still a bone of contention. I should say that
never since I myself was an undergraduate, that is to say, for the last
thirty years, has there been any dispute among Englishmen whose opinion
was worth taking, and who cared for poetry at all, on the general merits
of Wordsworth. But this agreement is compatible