In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe :

Strength should be Lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead :
Force should be right; or rather, Right and Wrong,
(Between whose endless jar Justice resides,)

Should lose their names, and so should Justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite a universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,

And, last, eat up himself.” *

In the progress of such a principle, Ulysses beheld

plagues, portents, and mutiny,—

"frights, changes, horrors,

Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

The unity and married calm of States
Quite from their fixure."

That Shakespeare, living in a peaceful age, under a monarchy yet unshaken, should have traced with such curious precision the hypothetic results of the false philosophy which was to be long after exemplified in France; and that France, in little more than sixty years after her first Revolution, should be brought again within the danger of these consequences, may serve to show how much we may learn from the imaginative reason without experience; and where the reason is not imagi*Troilus and Cressida,' Act. i., Scene 3.

native, how soon the lessons of experience are forgotten. In this country, where the imaginative character of the national intellect deepens and widens its contemplations and retards its conclusions, for the imagination is a self-questioning faculty,-I trust it is superfluous to insist upon the truth that liberty has no interest in equality. In France, where, with great activity of the other faculties, the popular imagination is small, weak, and at the same time, highly excitable,-for, in the mind as in the body, inflammatory action proceeds as often from weakness as from fulness,—it is a truth which the very elect of the instructed classes have shown themselves unable to discern.

But if the English people be safe from the grosser delusions which are now prevalent in France, they have, nevertheless, much to learn as to the moral and spiritual nature of liberty, and the impossibility of pushing it on by merely political impulses. This they will best learn from those by whom liberty is best loved: and there are no sources from which the love of liberty flows more freely than from the minds of the great Poets of England.

CRITICAL ESSAYS ON POETRY.

ESSAY ON THE POETICAL WORKS
OF MR.* WORDSWORTH.

(First published in 1834)

MR. WORDSWORTH's prefatory theories have been for many years sufficiently vexed and controverted; and the time seems to have come when, if we are to pause at all upon this threshold of his works, it should be with a view rather to a statement of the results than to a continuance of the disputation. In point of opinion the result has been, as to the matter of poetic diction, a very general admission that no real elevation can be given to poetry by the use of phrases which are no otherwise poetical than as not being met with in prose. In point of practice, the result might have been equally decided, if certain results of a different character had not been thrown up at the same time from other sources.

* In the year 1834 Wordsworth was naturally so designated. In this year of 1878 to write of Mr. Wordsworth would be as absurd as to write of Mr. Milton.

Some reforms have been effected, however. The poetical vocabulary in use precedently to Mr. Wordsworth's prefaces has been expurgated; Poetry is, in some particulars, more plain-spoken than she was then used to be; and some things are now called by their right names which were then considered to be more favourably presented to the reader under any other denominations than those which belong to them in the language of real life. Thus the bird commonly known by the name of the nightingale is now so called in poetry; whereas before Mr. Wordsworth's time no poet could be content to give it an appellation less poetical than "Philomel,” or "tuneful bird of night;" and the luminary which was formerly graced with some such titular distinction as "Bright Phoebus," or "Apollo's golden fire," is now to be met with in a volume of poetry under the same name as that which is given to it in the almanac.

So far the prefaces did their work; but hardly was it accomplished, when there sprang up a new growth of abuses; and whilst some of these bore a very close resemblance to their predecessors, others, though having their root in the same soil, tended more dangerously to the corruption of style, inasmuch as they were of a more covert and surreptitious nature. A bald misnomer like that of "Philomel" or "Bulbul," * " Albion" or "Erin,"

It has been said, by some one-I forget by whom-that he had learnt, for the first time, from Lord Byron's poetry, that two bulls make a nightingale.