rk.

His faults do not soften us, as the faults of so many favourite writers
do. They were the faults, not of passion, but of a superior person, who
was something of a Sir Willoughby Patterne in his pompous
self-satisfaction. "He says," records Lamb in one of his letters, "he
does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had a
mind to try it." Lamb adds: "It is clear that nothing is wanting but the
mind."

Leigh Hunt, after receiving a visit from Wordsworth in 1815, remarked
that "he was as sceptical on the merit of all kinds of poetry but one as
Richardson was on those of the novels of Fielding." Keats, who had
earlier spoken of the reverence in which he held Wordsworth, wrote to
his brother in 1818: "I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad
impression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity, and
bigotry." There was something frigidly unsympathetic in his judgment of
others, which was as unattractive as his complacency in regard to his
own work. When Trelawny, seeing him at Lausanne and, learning who he
was, went up to him as he was about to step into his carriage and asked
him what he thought of Shelley as a poet, he replied: "Nothing." Again,
Wordsworth spoke with solemn reprobation of certain of Lamb's
friendships, after Lamb was dead, as "the indulgences of social humours
and fancies which were often injurious to himself and causes of severe
regrets to his friends, without really benefiting the object of his
misapplied kindness."

Nor was this attitude of Johnny Head-in-Air the mark only of his later
years. It appeared in the days when he and Coleridge collaborated in
bringing out _Lyrical Ballads._ There is something sublimely egotistical
in the way in which he shook his head over _The Ancient Mariner_ as a
drag upon that miraculous volume. In the course of a letter to his
publisher, he wrote:--

From what I can gather it seems that _The Ancyent Marinere_ has, on
the whole, been an injury to the volume; I mean that the old words
and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on. If
the volume should come to a second edition, I would put in its
place some little things which would be more likely to suit the
common taste.

It is when one reads sentences like these that one begins to take a
mischievous delight in the later onslaught of a Scottish reviewer who,
indignant that Wordsworth should dare to pretend to be able to
appreciate Burns,