264 DRYDEN. 



the outward forms with a feeling rather than conviction 

 that, in poetry, substance and form are but manifestations 

 of the same inward life, the one fused into the other in the 

 vivid heat of their common expression. Wordsworth could 

 never wholly shake off the influence of the century into 

 which he was born. He began by proposing a reform of 

 the ritual, but it went no further than an attempt to get 

 rid of the words of Latin original where the meaning was 

 as well or better given in derivatives of the Saxon. He 

 would have stricken out the &quot; assemble &quot; and left the &quot; meet 

 together.&quot; Like Wesley, he might be compelled by neces 

 sity to a breach of the canon ; but, like him, he was never 

 a willing schismatic, andTris singing robes were the full and 

 flowing canonicals of the church by law established. Inspi 

 ration makes short work with the usage of the best authors 

 and ready-made elegances of diction; but where Words 

 worth is not possessed by his demon, as Moliere said of 

 Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Mil 

 ton in artifice of style, and Latinises his diction beyond 

 Dryden. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions 

 on instinct, and insensibly modified them as he studied the 

 masters of what may be called the Middle Period of Eng 

 lish verse.* As a young man, he disparaged Yirgil (&quot; We 

 talked. a great deal of nonsense in those days,&quot; he said when 

 taken to task for it later in life) ; at fifty-nine he translated 

 three books of the ^neid, in emulation of Dryden, though 

 falling far short of him in everything but closeness, as he 

 seems, after a few years, to have been convinced. Keats 

 was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder of 

 the modern school, which admit no cis-Elizabethan authority 

 save Milton, whose own English was formed upon those 

 earlier models. Keats denounced the authors of that 

 style which came in toward the close of the seventeenth 

 century, and reigned absolute through the whole of the 

 eighteenth, as 



* His &quot;Character of a Happy Warrior&quot; (1806), one of his noblest 

 poems, has a dash of Dryden in it, still more his &quot; Epistle to Sir 

 George Beaumont&quot; (1811). 



