duties. De Quincey speaks of this appointment as an
instance of the remarkable good luck which waited upon Wordsworth
through his whole life. In our view it is only another illustration of
that scripture which describes the righteous as never forsaken. Good
luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and
conscientious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his nomination to
the friendly exertions of the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to atone
as far as might be for the injustice of the first Earl, and who
respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated the
originality of the poet. The Collectorship at Whitehaven (a more
lucrative office) was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, and declined.
He had enough for independence, and wished nothing more. Still later,
on the death of the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part of that
district was annexed to Westmorland, and Wordsworth's income was
raised to something more than L1,000 a year.

In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow in
company with the Ettrick Shepherd. During this year _The Excursion_
was published, in an edition of five hundred copies, which supplied
the demand for six years. Another edition of the same number of copies
was published in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815 _The White
Doe of Rylstone_ appeared, and in 1816 _A Letter to a Friend of
Burns_, in which Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be
observed by the biographers of literary men. It contains many valuable
suggestions, but allows hardly scope enough for personal details, to
which he was constitutionally indifferent. Nearly the same date may be
ascribed to a rhymed translation of the first three books of the
_Aeneid_, a specimen of which was printed in the Cambridge
_Philological Museum_ (1832). In 1819 _Peter Bell_, written twenty
years before, was published, and, perhaps in consequence of the
ridicule of the reviewers, found a more rapid sale than any of his
previous volumes. _The Waggoner_, printed in the same year, was less
successful. His next publication was the volume of _Sonnets on the
river Duddon_, with some miscellaneous poems, 1820. A tour on the
Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for another collection,
published in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the volume of
_Ecclesiastical Sketches_. His subsequent publications were _Yarrow
Revisited_, 1835, and the tragedy of _The Borderers_, 1842.

During all the