d by some practical spadework at Ferry Hincksey,
to find that no other tutor in Oxford could see the slightest good or
meaning in what I was about; and that although my friend Professor
Rolleston occasionally sought the shades of our Rydalian laurels with
expressions of admiration, his professorial manner of "from pastoral
graves extracting thoughts divine" was to fill the Oxford Museum with
the scabbed skulls of plague-struck cretins.

80. I therefore respectfully venture to intimate to my bucolic friends,
that I know, more vitally by far than they, what _is_ in Wordsworth, and
what is not. Any man who chooses to live by his precepts will thankfully
find in them a beauty and rightness, (_exquisite_ rightness I called it,
in "Sesame and Lilies,") which will preserve him alike from mean
pleasure, vain hope, and guilty deed: so that he will neither mourn at
the gate of the fields which with covetous spirit he sold, nor drink of
the waters which with yet more covetous spirit he stole, nor devour the
bread of the poor in secret, nor set on his guest-table the poor man's
lamb:--in all these homely virtues and assured justices let him be
Wordsworth's true disciple; and he will then be able with equanimity to
hear it said, when there is need to say so, that his excellent master
often wrote verses that were not musical, and sometimes expressed
opinions that were not profound.

And the need to say so becomes imperative when the unfinished verse, and
uncorrected fancy, are advanced by the affection of his disciples into
places of authority where they give countenance to the popular national
prejudices from the infection of which, in most cases, they themselves
sprang.

81. Take, for example, the following three and a half lines of the 38th
Ecclesiastical Sonnet:--

"Amazement strikes the crowd; while many turn
Their eyes away in sorrow, others burn
With scorn, invoking a vindictive ban
From outraged Nature."

The first quite evident character of these lines is that they are
extremely bad iambics,--as ill-constructed as they are unmelodious; the
turning and burning being at the wrong ends of them, and the ends
themselves put just when the sentence is in its middle.

But a graver fault of these three and a half lines is that the
amazement, the turning, the burning, and the banning, are all alike
fictitious; and foul-fictitious, calumniously conceived no less than
falsely. Not one of the spectators of the scene refer