t is
precisely because Byron was _not_ his servant, that he could see the
gloom. To the Devil's true servants, their Master's presence brings both
cheerfulness and prosperity; with a delightful sense of their own wisdom
and virtue; and of the "progress" of things in general:--in smooth sea
and fair weather,--and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil:
as when once one is well within the edge of Maelstrom.]

[Footnote 87: "Island," ii. 4; perfectly orthodox theology, you observe;
no denial of the fall,--nor substitution of Bacterian birth for it. Nay,
nearly Evangelical theology, in contempt for the human heart; but with
deeper than Evangelical humility, acknowledging also what is sordid in
its civilization.]

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL.

IV.[88]

79. I fear the editor of the _Nineteenth Century_ will get little thanks
from his readers for allowing so much space in closely successive
numbers to my talk of old-fashioned men and things. I have nevertheless
asked his indulgence, this time, for a note or two concerning yet older
fashions, in order to bring into sharper clearness the leading outlines
of literary fact, which I ventured only in my last paper to secure in
_silhouette_, obscurely asserting itself against the limelight of recent
moral creed, and fiction manufacture.

The Bishop of Manchester, on the occasion of the great Wordsworthian
movement in that city for the enlargement, adornment, and sale of
Thirlmere, observed, in his advocacy of these operations, that very few
people, he supposed, had ever seen Tairlmere. His Lordship might have
supposed, with greater felicity, that very few people had ever read
Wordsworth. My own experience in that matter is that the amiable persons
who call themselves "Wordsworthian" have read--usually a long time
ago--"Lucy Gray," "The April Mornings," a picked sonnet or two, and the
"Ode on the Intimations," which last they seem generally to be under the
impression that nobody else has ever met with: and my further experience
of these sentimental students is, that they are seldom inclined to put
in practice a single syllable of the advice tendered them by their model
poet.

Now, as I happen myself to have used Wordsworth as a daily text-book
from youth to age, and have lived, moreover, in all essential points
according to the tenor of his teaching, it was matter of some
mortification to me, when, at Oxford, I tried to get the memory of Mr.
Wilkinson's spade honore