ABSTRACT

It would indeed be a satisfaction to the professional critic, and a reward for his long labours, if he could entertain the remotest idea of any direct effect being produced by them, on the extravagant mistakes of genius, and on the corruptions of cotemporary taste. It might be Utopian to form an expectation of this nature; but it perhaps may not be wholly chimerical to entertain the pleasing hope that an indirect effect is, in some distinguished cases, so produced; and that the re-action of literary opinion produces an amendment in style which no individual censor, or body of censors, can accomplish. In this comparatively slow result of criticism, in this good produced by the circuitous diffusion of truth, the critic only shares the common lot of all who work for the improvement of their fellow-men. Especially may he console himself with the reflection, that his superiors in the great council of the nation, who criticize on so much ampler a scale, are forced, like himself, to wait for this same round-about result of their patriotic orations: ministers being quite as incorrigible as authors by any direct appeal; and the well-informed of the community, – whose judgment needs only to be awakened and recalled to sound principles, whether of government or of literary composition, in order to demand and to secure the necessary changes in practice, – being at last the rational reformers by whom the prevailing evils are corrected. It certainly gives us sincere satisfaction to observe an improvement in Mr. Wordsworth, from whatever cause it arises. He has been put on his mettle, and starts for the present prize with a spirit and a beauty that have rarely characterized him in any passages of his long poetical course. We meet with poems in this volume which, in our judgment, would reflect honour on any of Mr. W.’s cotemporaries, and (which we consider as much higher praise) would stand a comparison with their neighbours if inserted among the minor efforts of the muse of old. The happiest of these productions, we think, are to be found among the miscellanies here printed; and not in the Sonnets on the river Duddon, although several of these are very happy; nor in ‘Vaudracour and Julia,’ which we regard as but a moderate composition. It is impossible to restrain a passing smile at the fineness of this title of ‘Vaudracour and Julia,’ when contrasted with ‘Peter Bell,’ and ‘The Waggoner.’ Mr. W. is determined to shew that he is at least as various as the singer in Horace; and that, if he can sound ‘the

very base string of humility,’ he can also strike the chords to the most ‘holiday and lady’ measures of which the harp is capable.