Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/437

Rh having been the eloquent eulogist of Milton, afterwards panegyrized Laud. It may be, however, but fair to remember in the case of Wordsworth, as in that of the youthful pantisocratists Coleridge and Southey, that, after fifty years of political progress, the youthful radical may appear, without blameable inconsistency—a steady conservative. In such a lapse of time, others have arisen to carry on the work of reform still further, and its earliest and most ardent supporters seem now to be laggards in the rear.

Wordsworth underrated the critical faculty, and certainly possessed it in but a niggard measure himself. His views on great political and social questions, on which Dr. Wordsworth appears to lay so much stress, are very far removed from being either sagacious or profound. Indeed, if we judge his intellectual powers by these, we shall be induced to suppose that a premature senility clouded his capacities, and that, after his wayward boyhood was over, he had passed from youth to age without the intervening period of manhood, that he was an old man at the time of life when others are young, and an old woman when he should have been an old man. He had all the faults of one who lived in a little world of his own, and reigned in that petty kingdom supreme. While his unfamiliarity with what was to other men familiar