Wordsworth's biography. 287 



essays on the poems of Wordsworth which were influen- 

 tial on the public mind, of any value in themselves, or of 

 any service to the poet. If the biographer neither knew 

 where to find the current literature which bore upon the 

 poet's works, or how to refer to it when found, then, as 

 the Americans say, he ought to. It is curious, too, that 

 not satisfied with knowing that the name of Wordsworth 

 is now one of the most illustrious in our country, and 

 must continue so till Ei >lish is an unknown tongue, he 

 goes into all the drivel about the ancestry, and the old 

 wooden Press. It was interesting enough to hear the old 

 man himself talk even of such things as these, knowing, 

 as we did, how he at other times communed with nature, 

 and forgot his ancestors ; but how a highly-educated 

 gentleman like the nephew, brought up in rather a high 

 position from his youth, and now occupying an influential 

 and honourable station, and with a just appreciation of 

 the now immortal memory of his great kinsman, should 

 have troubled himself with so much twaddle, is incompre- 

 hensible. I would as soon have expected a party of noble 

 sportsmen, pursuing the king of beasts, ' the armed rhi- 

 noceros, or the Hyrcean tiger,' to have turned aside to 

 disinter a mole. The conclusion I draw from the im- 

 portance attached to this affair of the Films filii filii is, 

 that in reality the Words worths never had any ancestors. 

 But let them now take care of themselves for a hundred 



