circulating truth-is to be apprehended from such scientific military establishments as appear to be eligible. And surely you will allow that martial qualities are the natural efflorescence of a healthy state of society. All great politicians seemed to have been of this opinion; in modern times, Machiavel, Lord Brooke, Sir Philip Sydney, Lord Bacon, Harrington, and lastly, Milton, whose tractate of education never loses sight of the means of making man perfect both for contemplation and action, for civil and military duties. But you are persuaded that if you take care of our civil privileges, they will generate all that can be needed of warlike excellence; and here only we differ. My opinion is that much of immediate fitness for warlike exploit may co-exist with a perfect security of our rights as citizens. Nay, I will go farther, and affirm that tendencies to degradation in our national chivalry may be counteracted by the existence of those capabilities for war in time of peace. But this point I do not wish to press. War we shall have, and I fear shortly-and alas! we are little fit to undertake it. At present there is nothing relating to politics, on which I should so much like to converse with you, as the conduct which it is desirable that the King of France should pursue. The French nation, less than any other, are fitted to be governed by moderation. Nothing but heat and passion will have any sway with them. Things must pass with them, as they did with us, in the first and second Charles's time, from one extreme to the other. Something to this effect is thrown out in a late number of the Courier: and I confess I have myself been long of that opinion. The reforming Royalists in Charles the First's time vanished before the Presbyterians, they before the Independents, they before the Army, and the Army before Cromwell; then things ran to the opposite extreme, with a force not to be resisted. Louis the Eighteenth stands as the successor of Cromwell; and not like our Revolution William. The throne of a James-theSecond Louis cannot I fear stand, but by the support of the passions of an active portion of his subjects; and how can such passions be generated but by deviation into what a moderate man would call Ultra-Royalist. Justice in the settlement of affairs has been cruelly disappointed, and this feeling it is which gives strength and a seeming reasonableness to these passions. The compromises once were intolerable." The following letter was written to Mr Gillies in 1816"RYDAL MOUNT, April 9, 1816.* MY DEAR SIR,-. . . Mr De Quincey has taken a fit of solitude, I have scarcely seen him since Mr Wilson left us. You are very obliging in having taken so much trouble about so slight a thing as the sonnet of mine you sent ine. It is not worth while to tell you by what circuitous channel it found its way into The Examiner, a journal which I never see, though I have great respect for the talent of its editor. In the Champion, another weekly journal, have appeared not long since five sonnets of mine, all of which are much superior to the one which you have sent me. They will form part of a publication which I sent to the press three weeks ago, which you have been given to understand was a long work, but it is in fact very short, not more than seven hundred verses altogether. The principal poem is three hundred lines long, a Thanksgiving Ode, and the others refer almost exclusively to recent public events. The whole may be regarded as a sequel to the sonnets dedicated to liberty, and accordingly I have given directions for its being printed uniform with my poems to admit of its being bound up also with them. I have also sent to press a letter in * Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, by R. P. Gillies, vol. ii. pp. 162, 163. prose, occasioned by an intended republication of Dr Currie's Life of Burns. When these little things will be permitted to see the light I know not; and as the publisher has not even condescended to acknowledge the receipt of the manuscripts, which were sent three weeks ago, you may judge from this of the value which the goods of the author of The Excursion at present bear, in the estimation of the trade. N'importe; if we have done well, we shall not miss our reward. Farewell!Yours faithfully, Gray failed as a poet, not because he took too much. pains, and so extinguished his animation, but because he had very little of that fiery quality to begin with, and his pains were of the wrong sort. He wrote English verses as his brother Eton schoolboys wrote Latin, filching a phrase now from one author and now from another. I do not profess to be a person of very various reading; nevertheless, if I were to pluck out of Gray's tail all the feathers which I know belong to other birds, he would be left very bare indeed. Do not let anybody persuade you that any quantity of good verses can be produced by mere felicity; or that an immortal style can be the growth of mere genius. 'Multa tulit fecitque' must be the motto of all those who are to last. There are poems now existing which all the world ran after at their first appearance, and it will continue to run after their like, that do not deserve to be thought of as literary works, everything in them being skindeep merely as to thought and feeling, the juncture or * Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, vol. ii. pp. 165, 166. suture of the composition not being a jot more cunning or more fitted for endurance than the first fastening together of fig-leaves in Paradise. But I need not press upon you the necessity of labour, as you have avowed your conviction upon this subject. Pray remember me to the Wilsons most kindly. When does Mr Wilson return to Westmoreland? I have not yet seen his City of the Plague; the more the pity, for I quarrel with the title. Tell Mr Wilson this from me, and repeat the two following quotations : and this But whate'er enjoyments dwell In the impenetrable cell Of the silent heart which Nature Cock-a-doodle doo, My dame has lost her shoe; -Farewell, with great regard and esteem, yours, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH." "RYDAL MOUNT, Nov. 16, 1816.* MY DEAR SIR,— If you write more blank verse, pray pay particular attention to your versification, especially as to the pauses on the first, second, third, eighth, and ninth syllables. These pauses should never be introduced for convenience, and not often for the sake of variety merely, but for some especial effect of harmony or emphasis. -I remain, with great respect, most truly yours, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH." "RYDAL MOUNT (date wanting), 1817.+ MY DEAR SIR, I am unworthy of the many acts of kind attention you bestow on me. I know nothing of the treatise * Memoirs of a Literary Veteran, vol. ii. p. 169. + Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 169-70. of Wieland, which you inquired after, or I should have written immediately on receipt of your letter. But how could you write: 'at every step the scenery seemed improving'? This is a thoroughly bad verse; bad even for prose. Your essay is desultory enough. Of the soundness of the opinions it becomes me not to judge. The famous passage on Solitude, which you quote from Lord Byron, does not deserve the notice which has been bestowed on it. As composition it is bad, particularly the line Minions of grandeur shrinking from distress, is foisted in for the sake of the rhyme. But the sentiment by being expressed in an antithetic manner is taken out of the region of high and imaginative feeling to be placed in that of point and epigram. To illustrate my meaning, and for no other purpose, I refer to my own lines on the Wye, where you will find the same sentiment not formally put as it is here, but ejaculated as it were fortuitously in the musical succession of preconceived feeling. Compare the paragraph ending How often has my spirit turned to thee, and the one where occur the lines— And greetings where no kindness is, and all with these lines of Lord Byron, and you will perceive the difference. You will give me credit for writing for the sake of truth, and not for so disgusting a motive as self-commendation at the expense of a man of genius. .-Most faithfully yours, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH." |
