ABSTRACT
Mr Wordsworth has undoubtedly genius, and charming passages are to be found in his verse; but on the whole, it is not first rate; often meanly familiar, and almost as often turgid and obscure; therefore I cannot think his judgment and decisions should be implicitly received. He is right in observing, that the use of common life simple language in verse, is frequently a beauty, but not right in extending that use to all modes of phraseology within the limits of the immodest, the disgusting, and the ungrammatic. A thousand instances might be brought where neither decency or grammar are violated, and yet where a low and ludicrous effect is produced in verse by habits of expression which even polite conversation might not refuse to tolerate; [rather inconsequentially quotes examples from Dryden, Shakespeare and Hayley, who has been ‘deplorably infected by Wordsworth’s system’].
