declamation. Spoke of the Scottish novels. Is sure they are Scott's. When I mentioned the abundance of them, as being rather too great for one man to produce, he said that great fertility was the characteristic of all novelists and story-tellers. Richardson could have gone on for ever; his Sir Charles Grandison was, originally, in thirty volumes. Instanced Charlotte Smith, Madame Cottin, etc. etc. Scott, since he was a child, accustomed to legends, and to the exercise of the story-telling faculty, sees nothing to stop him as long as he can hold a pen. Spoke of the very little real knowledge of poetry that existed now; so few men had time to study. For instance, Mr. Canning; one could hardly select a cleverer man; and yet, what did Mr. Canning know of poetry? what time had he, in the busy political life he had led, to study Dante, Homer, etc., as they ought to be studied, in order to arrive at the true principles of taste in works of genius. Mr. Fox, indeed, towards the latter part of his life, made leisure for himself, and took to improving his mind; and, accordingly, all his later public displays bore a greater stamp of wisdom and good taste than his early ones. Mr. Burke alone was an exception to this description of public men: by far the greatest man of his age; not only abounding in knowledge himself, but feeding, in various directions, his most able contemporaries; assisting Adam Smith in his Political Economy, and Reynolds in his Lectures on Painting. Fox, too, who acknowledged that all he had ever learned from books was nothing to what he had derived from Burke.* I walked with Wordsworth to the Tuileries he goes off to-morrow."

:

In the Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, published anonymously in 1836, but edited by T. Allsop, there are some interesting allusions to Wordsworth

"There is much justice in these remarks of Mr. Wordsworth," adds Lord John Russell, the editor of Moore's Journal.

about this time. Few of the dates of the incidents mentioned are given; but in Allsop's twenty-seventh letter (dated May 4, 1821) he writes thus of meeting Wordsworth in London :

"Met Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth, with Mr. Talfourd, Monkhouse, and Robinson. A very delightful evening. Wordsworth almost as good a reader as Coleridge; to a stranger I think he would seem to carry even more authority, both in what he read and said. He spoke of Southey and Coleridge with measured respect, and, as I thought, just appreciation. Pointed out some passages in The Curse of Kehama which he admired, and repeated some portions of The Ancient Mariner ; also from The River Duddon and The Excursion. Repeated The Highland Girl. He seemed to me to present the idea of a poet in whom the repressive faculty was predominant. Taken altogether, he impressed me very favourably, and I regret deeply that I did not avail myself of subsequent opportunities not seldom proffered by Lamb and Coleridge-of meeting him more frequently. But I then laboured under the impression that he had not acted kindly to that dear and loved being, whom I loved living, and honour dead. Even now, when myself almost indifferent to new associations, I regret this enforced denial of what at that period would have enhanced the value of existence, communion with that glorious and effulgent mind; but I do not regret the impulses which led to this self-denial." *

In the same letter Allsop tells us that he "once wrote to Wordsworth to inquire if he was really a Christian. He replied, When I am a good man, then I am a Christian.'" It would be interesting to recover the letter in which this remark was made.

In his last letter, No. 45, Allsop represents Coleridge as saying:†

* Vol. i. pp. 222, 223.

+ Vol. ii. p. 238.

Of all the men I ever knew, Wordsworth has the least femineity in his mind. He is all man. He is a man of whom it might have been said, 'It is good for him to be alone.''

When Mr. Allsop says of Coleridge that his mind was at once the most masculine, feminine, and yet child-like (and in that case the most innocent) which it is possible to imagine,” the value of his diagnosis may be guessed. Nevertheless he may have accurately reported Coleridge's remark on Wordsworth, which has a certain truth underneath it.

After his fortnight in London, Wordsworth went down with his wife to Cambridge, where they spent thirteen days at the Lodge, Trinity College (November 24 to December 6). From Cambridge Wordsworth wrote thus to Lord Lonsdale :

"Master's Lodge, Trinity College, Cambridge, 4th December 1820.

I am much gratified with what I have seen of this University. There is a great ardour of study among the young men. The masters, tutors, and lecturers appear for the most part to be very zealous in the discharge of their duties.

"

Cambridge seems to have inspired Wordsworth to sonnetwriting in December of this year, just as Oxford had inspired him in the month of May. I infer, from a letter to Robinson, that one of the three fine sonnets-afterwards included in the Ecclesiastical series on the Inside of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, was composed during this visit. In a letter dated March 13, 1821, he says of his time at Cambridge :—

What with the company (although I saw very little of him) of my dear brother, our stately apartments, with all the

venerable portraits there that awe one into humility, old friends, new acquaintances, and a thousand familiar remembrances, and freshly conjured-up recollections, I enjoyed myself not a little. I should like to send you a sonnet composed at Cambridge, but it is reserved for cogent reasons-to be imparted in due time."

From Cambridge William and Mary Wordsworth went down to the Beaumonts at Coleorton. They stayed there from December 2d to December 20th, and then went north by Manchester and Kendal to Rydal.

After her return from the Continent, Dorothy Wordsworth seems to have gone direct from London to the Clarksons at Playford Hall, near Ipswich, where her nephew William was residing. She joined that nephew at Cambridge before the end of his Christmas holidays, and left Cambridge for Rydal about the 26th January 1821.

*It is possible that this sonnet may have been that which he afterwards named Recollection of the Portrait of King Henry VIII., Trinity College, Cambridge. See vol. vii. p. 101.

CHAPTER XXXII.

ECCLESIASTICAL SKETCHES-TOUR IN SCOTLAND AND BELGIUM— CORRESPONDENCE, 1821-1824.

DURING Wordsworth's residence in Leicestershire, in December 1820, Sir George Beaumont-who was about to build a new church on Coleorton Moor-talked a good deal to him about the ecclesiastical history of England. This led not only to his writing some sonnets on the subject while staying at Coleorton, but to the larger idea of embodying the entire story of the Anglican Church in a series of Ecclesiastical Sketches. His mind had been turned to Church questions for many years. He had discussed them with his brother Christopher, who, while dean and rector of Bocking, had published six volumes of Ecclesiastical Biography, and, as he explained in a note to the Sketches when first published, "the Catholic question, which was agitated in Parliament about that time, kept my thoughts in the same course." Southey wrote to his friend, C. H. Townsend, from Keswick, on the 6th of May 1821 :—

"The Wordsworths spoke of you with great pleasure upon their return from Cambridge. He was with us lately. His thoughts and mine have for some time unconsciously been travelling in the same direction; for while I have been sketching a brief history of the English Church, and the systems which it has subdued or struggled with, he has been pursuing precisely the same subject in a series of sonnets, to which my volume will serve for a commentary, as completely as if it had been written with that intent." *

* Southey's Life and Correspondence, vol. v. p. 79; also a letter to C. Bedford, vol. v. p. 65.