including Wordsworth's own. And Wordsworth was too
honest, as well as too exclusive, to write so much even to a Son of the
dead Poet, without meaning all he said.

I should not have written all this were it not that I think so much of
Mr. Woodberry's Paper; but I doubt I could not persuade him to think more
of my old Man than he sees good to think for himself. I rejoice that he
thinks even so well of the Poet: even if his modified Praise does not
induce others to try and think likewise. The verses he quotes--

Where is that virtue which the generous boy, etc. {283}

made my heart glow--yes, even out at my Eyes--though so familiar to me.
Only in my private Copy, instead of

When Vice had triumph--_who his tear bestow'd_
On injured merit--

in place of that '_bestowed Tear_,' I cannot help reading

When Vice and Insolence in triumph rode, etc.

which is, of course, only for myself, and you, it seems: for I never
mentioned that, and some scores of such impudencies.

_To R. C. Trench_.

LITTLE GRANGE, WOODBRIDGE.
_May_ 9/80.

MY DEAR LORD,

You are old enough, like myself, to remember People reading and talking
of Crabbe. I know not if you did so yourself; but you know that no one,
unless as old as ourselves, does so now. As he has always been one of my
Apollos, in spite of so many a cracked string, I wanted to get a few
others to listen a little as I did; and so printed the Volume which I
send you: printed it, not by way of improving, or superseding, the
original, but to entice some to read the original in all its length, and
(one must say) uncouth and wearisome '_longueurs_' and want of what is
now called 'Art.' These Tales are perhaps as open to that charge as any
of his; and, moreover, not principally made up of that 'sternest' stuff
which Byron celebrated as being most characteristic of him. When writing
these Tales, the Poet had reached his Grand Climacteric, and liked to
look on somewhat of the sunnier side of things; more on the Comedy than
the Tragedy of Human Life: and hence these Tales are, with all their
faults, the one work of his which leaves me (ten years past my Grand
Climacteric also) with a pleasant Impression. So I tried to make others
think; but I was told by Friends whose Judgment I could trust that no
Public would listen to me. . . . And so I paid for my printing, and kept
my Book to be given away to some few as old as myself, and brought up in
somewhat of another Fas