Page:The poetical works of Leigh Hunt, containing many pieces now first collected 1849.djvu/13

 better have shown his admiration of reigning names in a shape less particular. Circumstances may even conspire to make him fear misconstructions painful on all sides, where acknowledgment of another sort would seem to give double reasons for its extension. Such are the perplexities in preparation for juvenile confidence! The Author therefore must beg that the "Feast of the Poets" may be regarded rather as a fancy of by-gone years than a criticism. The "Feast of the Violets" is avowedly such. It is not that he thinks less of any of the poets mentioned considered without reference to others, but higher of some than he used; and that the number seated at Apollo's table ought either to have been less or greater. Admiration is a delight and a duty; but when it even implies comparative criticism, it touches upon a peril which among contemporaries is proverbially odious, and not seldom rash and to be repented. A sense of justice, for instance, to a name so great in other respects that it has injured his reputation for poetry (most people finding it difficult to entertain two ideas at once on this subject) compels me to observe, that in fighting hard for the honours of Wordsworth, at a time when the advocacy was not superfluous, I was not sufficiently attentive to those of Coleridge; and that without entering into the comparative merits of the two, or lowering a jot of my estimation of the former, considered in himself, it appears to me, that since the days of Milton there has been no greater name for pure quintessential poetry, than that of the author