completed, and exhibited for the first time, in 1820. Henry Crabb Robinson wrote of it:-"The group of Wordsworth, Newton, and Voltaire is ill executed. The poet is a forlorn and haggard old man; the philosopher is a sleek, welldressed citizen of London; and Voltaire is merely an ugly Frenchman."

In 1820 Wordsworth published his River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets; appending to it a few other poems and his topographical description of the Lakes. On receiving a copy, Charles Lamb wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth :

“May 25, 1820.

DEAR MISS W.-... There can be none to whom the last volume of W. W. has come more welcome than to me. I have traced the Duddon in thought and with repetition along the banks (alas !) of the Sea-unpoetical name; it is always flowing and murmuring and dashing in my ears. The story of Dion is divine-the genius of Plato falling on him like moonlight-the finest thing ever expressed. Then there is Elidure and Kirkstone Pass-the last not new to me-and let me add one of the sweetest of them all to me, The Longest Day. Loving all these as much as I can love poetry new to me, what could I wish or desire more or extravagantly in a new volume? That I did not write to W. W. was simply that he was to come so soon, flattens letters.

Yours,

On the 2nd June, Crabb Robinson wrote:

and that

C. L."

"I went to Lamb's, where Wordsworth and Mrs W. were. Lamb was in a good humour. He read some recent compositions, which Wordsworth cordially praised. He seemed to enjoy his society. Not much was said about his new volume of poems. But he himself spoke of Brownie's Cell, as his

favourite. It appears that he had heard of a recluse living in the island, when there himself, and afterwards of his being gone, no one knew whither, as the fact on which the poem is founded.*

Sunday 11th.-W. still lets me hope that I may have the opportunity of travelling with him. He was, however, more occupied about the new edition of Peter Bell. He has resolved to make some concessions to public taste, and has resolved to strike out several offensive passages, such as

Is it a party in a parlour, &c.,

which I had implored him to leave out, before the book first appeared. So the over-coarse expression, 'But I will bang your bones,' &c., &c. I never before saw W. so little opinionated, so willing to make sacrifices for the sake of popularity, as now. He is improved not a little by this in my mind.

Wordsworth was very

21st. I called on Monkhouse. pleasant. Indeed, he is uniformly so now; and there is absolutely no pretence for what was always an exaggerated charge against him, that he can talk only of his own poetry, and loves only his own works. He is more indulgent than he used to be of the works of others, even rivals and contemporaries; and is more open to argument in favour of changes in his own works."

* The following is an interesting incident of this 2nd day of June 1820. Charles Lamb presented Wordsworth with a copy of the first editions of Paradise Regained and Lycidas (1677), with the following inscription :"C. Lamb, to the best knower of Milton, and therefore the worthiest occupant of this pleasant edition. June 2nd, 1820."-It may be added that in November 1820, when Wordsworth returned from the Continent, S. Rogers presented him with a copy of the second edition of Paradise Lost (1669), and wrote in the volume-"One of the most precious I can give, or you receive. It will acquire a new value by becoming yours."

NOTE.

ALTHOUGH it has been explained in the Preface to the first volume of this Biography, it may be as well to add here that the appendices which follow would have been reserved for the end of the third volume-their most appropriate place-had it not been found necessary to send the earlier chapters of that volume to press, before the latter ones were finished, and before the exact length to which it would extend was known. The material which these appendices contain refer to various periods in the Life of Wordsworth, and those who wish to follow the story of his life connectedly to its close, may pass to volume three, before they examine these detached memoranda.

APPENDICES.

APPENDIX L

REMINISCENSES BY THE LATE BISHOP OF LINCOLN AND THE REV. R. PERCEVAL GRAVES.

"I CONTENT myself," wrote the Bishop, in 1850, “with noting down some record of opinions which he expressed from time to time on literary subjects in my hearing,— some of them nearly a quarter of a century ago."

"First read the ancient classical authors; then come to us; and you will be able to judge for yourself which of us is worth reading.

The first book of Homer appears to be independent of the rest. The plan of the Odyssey is more methodical than that of the Iliad. The character of Achilles seems to me one of the grandest ever conceived. There is something awful in it, particularly in the circumstance of his acting under an abiding foresight of his own death. One day, conversing with Payne Knight and Uvedale Price concerning Homer, I expressed my admiration of Nestor's speech, as eminently natural, where he tells the Greek leaders that they are mere children in comparison with the heroes of old whom he had known.* 'But,' said Knight and Price, that passage is spurious!' However, I will not part with it. It is inter

* Iliad, i. 260

esting to compare the same characters (Ajax, for instance) as treated by Homer, and then afterwards by the Greek dramatists, and to mark the difference of handling. In the plays of Euripides, politics come in as a disturbing force: Homer's characters act on physical impulse. There is more introversion in the dramatist: whence Aristotle rightly calls him rpayıxararos. The tower-scene, where Helen comes into τραγικώτατος. the presence of Priam and the old Trojans, displays one of the most beautiful pictures anywhere to be seen. Priam's speech on that occasion is a striking proof of the courtesy and delicacy of the Homeric age, or, at least, of Homer himself.

*

Catullus translated literally from the Greek; succeeding Roman writers did not so, because Greek had then become the fashionable, universal language. They did not translate, but they paraphrased; the ideas remaining the same, their dress different. Hence the attention of the poets of the Augustan age was principally confined to the happy selection of the most appropriate words and elaborate phrases; and hence arises the difficulty of translating them.

The characteristics ascribed by Horace to Pindar in his ode, Pindarum quisquis,' &c., are not found in his extant writings. Horace had many lyrical effusions of the Theban bard which we have not. How graceful is Horace's modesty in his Ego apis Matinæ More modoque,' as contrasted with the Dircæan Swan! Horace is my great favourite: I love him dearly.

I admire Virgil's high moral tone: for instance, that sublime Aude, hospes, contemnere opes,' &c., and 'his dantem jura Catonem!' What courage and independence of spirit is there! There is nothing more imaginative and awful than the passage,

* Iliad, iii. 156.