66 June 13/87. As to copyright, looking to all the interests involved, I now think the method of Talfourd and the present law faulty, and capable of being replaced by one better for all parties." " June 17/87. I was an eager supporter of Serjeant Talfourd, but have long since altered my view, and am of opinion that a more free system of copyright than the present one is possible, and would be more advantageous to the authors, the trade, and the public." The following fragment found amongst Wordsworth's papers, referring to Time as the only infallible judge as to the value of Literary works, may fitly close this chapter:— It seems, therefore, only to remain for me, with the view of strengthening a cause so just, to point to and bring forth a few facts which tend to show that of good and great literature-which it is to be presumed we would all wish to see rise up among us-Time is the only infallible judge. Time considered for the future, and not as a fresh and light-footed stripling of a year, or a few lustrums, but with his accustomed grey locks, his wrinkled brow, his hour-glass in one hand, his destructive scythe in the other. I would also add to these insignia a sort of Pilgrim's bottle attached to the old man's body, from which he might water in his progress such of the young plants about him as he knows are destined for immortality. But printers, and publishers, and cold-blooded doctrinaires will think I am betraying the cause by taking this flight, and I must descend. The fate and fortune of books is in many respects most remarkable. Some that on their first appearance have been extolled in Courts and by Universities and Academies, have quickly forfeited that kind of favour without ever making their way to the public, or deserving to do so. Others have been eagerly received by the middle and humbler ranks of the community, while they were disregarded by the upper classes, and have continued to be dear to the many, though centuries perhaps may have passed away without their obtaining the sanction, except in rare instances, of those who value themselves upon a cultivated taste. Take for example The Pilgrim's Progress. Cowper, the poet, being prompted to speak his thought of that beautiful allegory, more than a hundred years after its publication, says in the course of his panegyric: I named thee not, lest so despised a name and who but must be struck with the clouds that darken for a time the splendour of those productions whose merits were at first unacknowledged in the highest quarters. In Charles II.'s days ten plays of B. and F* were acted for one of Shakespeare. Bysshe, in his Art of Poetry, published about the same period, writes thus of Chaucer and Spenser: "Their language has now become so antiquated and obsolete that most readers of our age have no ear for them, nor, I must confess, is the taste of Chaucer to be wondered at "; but Bysshe immediately adds, "and this is the reason that the good Shakespeare himself is not so frequently cited in this collection as he would otherwise deserve to be." In fact, he is rarely cited at all. Dryden, Cowley, Otway, Rowe, Blackmore, and Butler are the writers from which his extracts are almost exclusively taken, there being very few even from Milton. Again, books, the production of true genius sometimes, when they first appear, obtain general circulation for their faults. Such, as I have elsewhere noticed, was the case with Thomson's Seasons, which was admired for its sentimental flourishes and its foolish or ill-told tales-when the nobler movements of this poet's imagination were unfelt, as * Doubtless Beaumont and Fletcher. they seemed not to have been till a critic directed attention to them forty years afterwards. The fate of Dr. Johnson's Rambler is not to be overlooked. In his concluding Number he thus expresses himself: "I am far from supposing that the cessation of my performances will raise any enquiry, for I have never been much a favourite with the public." He then proceeds to give some high-minded reasons why he does not complain of neglect, and to show that he did not obtain immediate favour because he seldom descended to the arts by which it is obtained. Yet I well remember that forty-five years ago an intelligent bookseller, contrasting the slow progress to. public notice made by the Rambler compared with its rival periodical papers, the Adventurer and the Idler, observed that editions of the Rambler were constantly called for, while the other two lighter works, which were popular on their first appearance, could scarcely float at all except by the aid of. collections. . . . When it was thought expedient for the sake of his (Johnson's) health-declining through age and his depressed spirits he should travel abroad, his friends might have been spared the necessity of applying to Government in his behalf, and escaped the mortification of being refused. This, by-the-by. I have endeavoured to show that Time is the only judge in Literature that can be absolutely depended upon. CHAPTER XLII. REMINISCENCES-DOMESTIC INCIDENTS—AND LETTERS, 1838-1840. THE relationship which Wordsworth sustained toward one of the most distinguished literary men of his time-Walter Savage Landor-has been a good deal misunderstood. It was a chequered relationship-extremely cordial and appreciative at one time, and again overshadowed by cloud, and by a misunderstanding that was perhaps mutual. As in the case of other contemporaries, it may be as well to bring together some facts in reference to it extending over a series of years, rather than break up the narrative by referring each particular to its own year; and we must go back as far as the year 1817 in order to understand it. In that year-two years after Landor had gone to reside in Italy-Southey sent out to him copies of The White Doe of Rylstone and The Excursion. In acknowledging receipt of them Landor said he would have given eighty pounds out of his pocket if Wordsworth had not written the line in his dedication of The Excursion Of high respect and gratitude sincere. In writing home from Pisa to his old schoolfellow Birch, he told him of a Latin essay he was writing, and of the eulogy of Wordsworth which it would contain. Southey kept sending him out his friend's poems (Peter Bell and the Duddon Sonnets in 1820). He replied, "In whatever Wordsworth writes there is admirable poetry; but I wish he had omitted all that precedes 'There was a time,' in Peter Bell. The first poet that ever wrote was not a more original poet than he is, and the best is hardly a greater." Mr. Forster (Landor's biographer) tells us that the latter had "planned a Latin essay supplementary to the treatise prefixed to his Latin poems"; and Landor told Southey, "I have finished my translation of Wordsworth's criticisms, saying in the preface that I had taken whatever I wanted from him with the same liberty as a son eats and drinks in his father's house."* Wordsworth wrote to Landor in September 1821, and told him The Excursion is proud of your approbation." Again he said, "It could not but be grateful to be praised by a poet who has written verses of which I would rather have been the author than of any produced in our time." Landor's original intention was to dedicate his Imaginary Conversations to Wordsworth. The dedication had been offered, and accepted; but, as Landor afterwards told Southey, he had written in them conversations "with such asperity, and contemptuousness of the people in power," that a sense of delicacy would not permit me to place Wordsworth's name before the volume. The book was published in London in February 1824, and in December Wordsworth added a postscript to a letter from Southey to Landor-who was still in Italy-thanking him for the dialogues, which he called great acquisition to literature." Landor was much gratified. Everything that either Wordsworth or Southey wrote seems to have been sent out by the latter to Florence; and Landor sent "an overflowing return in kind" from Italy. а In the autumn of 1835 Landor came to England, and in the following summer, when Wordsworth went up to town expressly to hear and see the performance of Talfourd's * Life of Walter Savage Landor, p. 203. |