al tales of love and war, he
would not have gone mad.

"But his reason only lay 'couched,' not overthrown. Only give him a
dose of the balsam of Fierabras, his reason shall spring out of its
lair, like a lion from out its hiding-place, as indeed it did; and you
then have that wonderful piece of rhetoric, which describes the army
of Alifanfaron in the eighteenth chapter, Part I.

"There are many other things worthy of note, such as

'crazed
By love and feeling, and internal thought
Protracted among endless solitudes,'

all of which are 'fit epithets blessed in the marriage of pure words,'
which the author of 'The Prelude', without any special learning, or
personal knowledge of Spain, has given us, and are so striking as to
compel us once again to go to Wordsworth and say, 'we do not all
understand thee yet, not all that thou hast given us.'

Very truly yours, A. J. Duffield."

Ed.]

[Footnote E: Compare 'Paradise Lost', v. 1. 150:

'In prose or numerous verse.'

Ed.]

[Footnote F: Wordsworth's earliest teachers, before he was sent to
Hawkshead School, were his mother and the Rev. Mr. Gilbanks at
Cockermouth, and Mrs. Anne Birkett at Penrith. His mother and Dame
Birkett taught him to read, and trained his infant memory. Mr. Gilbanks
also gave him elementary instruction; while his father made him commit
to memory portions of the English poets. At Hawkshead he read English
literature, learned Latin and Mathematics, and wrote both English and
Latin verse. There was little or no method, and no mechanical or
artificial drill in his early education. Though he was taught both
languages and mathematics he was left as free to range the "happy
pastures" of literature, as to range the Hawkshead woods on autumn
nights in pursuit of woodcocks. It is likely that the reference in the
above passage is to his education both in childhood and in youth,
although specially to the former. In his 'Autobiographical Memoranda',
Wordsworth says,

"Of my earliest days at School I have little to say, but that they
were very happy ones, chiefly because I was left at liberty, then and
in the vacations, to read whatever books I liked. For example, I read
all Fielding's works, 'Don Quixote', 'Gil Blas', and any part of
Swift that I liked; 'Gulliver's Travels' and the 'Tale of a Tub' being
both much to my taste."

As Wordsworth alludes to Coleridge's educ