ABSTRACT
I was quite certain that you would appreciate Wordsworth justly. Nations, you say, are not proud of living genius. They are proud of it only as far as they understand it; and the majority, being incapable of understanding it, can never admire it, till they take it upon trust: so that two or three generations must pass before the public affect to admire such poets as Milton and Wordsworth. Of such men the world scarcely produces one in a millenium; – has it, indeed, ever produced more than two? for Shakspeare is of a different class. But of all inferior degrees of poets no
age and no country was ever so prolific as our own: every season produces some half dozen poems, not one of which obtains the slightest attention, and any one of which would have the author celebrated above all contemporaries five-and-twenty years ago.
