rite English: that young Keats
was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael: and that
a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately published two volumes of
verses, might take rank with the greatest poets of all. Doctor Johnson
not write English! Lord Byron not one of the greatest poets of the
world! Sir Walter a poet of the second order! Mr. Pope attacked for
inferiority and want of imagination; Mr. Keats and this young Mr.
Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern poetic literature! What
were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington delivered with a puff of
tobacco-smoke: to which Mr. Honeyman blandly assented and Clive listened
with pleasure? Such opinions were not of the Colonel's time. He tried
in vain to construe Oenone, and to make sense of Lamia. Ulysses he could
understand; but what were these prodigious laudations bestowed on it?
And that reverence for Mr. Wordsworth, what did it mean? Had he not
written Peter Bell, and been turned into deserved ridicule by all
the reviews? Was that dreary Excursion to be compared to Goldsmith's
Traveller, or Doctor Johnson's Imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal?
If the young men told the truth, where had been the truth in his own
young days, and in what ignorance had our forefathers been brought
up?--Mr. Addison was only an elegant essayist, and shallow trifler! All
these opinions were openly uttered over the Colonel's claret, as he and
Mr. Binnie sate wondering at the speakers, who were knocking the gods of
their youth about their ears. To Binnie the shock was not so great; the
hard-headed Scotchman had read Hume in his college days, and sneered
at some of the gods even at that early time. But with Newcome the
admiration for the literature of the last century was an article of
belief: and the incredulity of the young men seemed rank blasphemy. "You
will be sneering at Shakspeare next," he said: and was silenced, though
not better pleased, when his youthful guests told him, that Doctor
Goldsmith sneered at him too; that Dr. Johnson did not understand him,
and that Congreve, in his own day and afterwards, was considered to
be, in some points, Shakspeare's superior. "What do you think a man's
criticism is worth, sir," cries Mr. Warrington, "who says those lines of
Mr. Congreve, about a church--

'How reverend is the face of yon tall pile,
Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads,
To bear aloft its vast and ponderous roof,
By its own