it. We may safely retain
such passages as that well-known one--

----His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness; nor appear'd
Less than archangel ruin'd; and the excess
Of glory obscur'd--

for the theory, which is opposed to them, "falls flat upon the grunsel
edge, and shames its worshippers." Let us hear no more then of this
monkish cant, and bigotted outcry for the restoration of the horns and
tail of the devil!--Again, as to the other work, Burke's Reflections, I
took a particular pride and pleasure in it, and read it to myself and
others for months afterwards. I had reason for my prejudice in favour of
this author. To understand an adversary is some praise: to admire him is
more. I thought I did both: I knew I did one. From the first time I ever
cast my eyes on anything of Burke's (which was an extract from his Letter
to a Noble Lord in a three-times a week paper, The St. James's Chronicle,
in 1796), I said to myself, "This is true eloquence: this is a man pouring
out his mind on paper." All other style seemed to me pedantic and
impertinent. Dr. Johnson's was walking on stilts; and even Junius's (who
was at that time a favourite with me) with all his terseness, shrunk up
into little antithetic points and well-trimmed sentences. But Burke's
style was forked and playful as the lightning, crested like the serpent.
He delivered plain things on a plain ground; but when he rose, there was
no end of his flights and circumgyrations--and in this very Letter, "he,
like an eagle in a dove-cot, fluttered _his_ Volscians," (the Duke of
Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale[151]) "in Corioli." I did not care for
his doctrines. I was then, and am still, proof against their contagion;
but I admired the author, and was considered as not a very staunch
partisan of the opposite side, though I thought myself that an abstract
proposition was one thing--a masterly transition, a brilliant metaphor,
another. I conceived, too, that he might be wrong in his main argument,
and yet deliver fifty truths in arriving at a false conclusion. I remember
Coleridge assuring me, as a poetical and political set-off to my sceptical
admiration, that Wordsworth had written an Essay on Marriage, which, for
manly thought and nervous expression, he deemed incomparably superior. As
I had not, at that time, seen any specimens of Mr. Wordsworth's prose
style, I could not express my doubts on the subject. If there are greater
prose-w