proclaim the great merits of Wordsworth.

The third group was larger than either of the preceding, retained its
_esprit de corps_ longer, and may be most conveniently defined as the
associates of Charles Lamb. Beside Lamb, there were Coleridge, Southey,
Lovel, Dyer, Lloyd, and Wordsworth, among the earlier members of
it,--and Hazlitt, Talfourd, Godwin, De Quincy, Bernard Barton, Procter,
Leigh Hunt, Gary, and Hood, among the later. This group, unlike the
others, did not make politics, but literature, its leading object. It
was composed of literary men,--a title of doubtful import, but which
certainly in civilized society will always designate a class. Political
life has more of outward importance, religious life is holier, but
literary life is the most humane of all the avocations. It is to the
professions what pastoral occupations are to the trades. Politics and
religion both have something to do with institutions. A mechanical
man can play a part in them not very well, but passably well. But
the literary man is sheer humanity, with nothing to help him but his
thoughtfulness and sensibility. He is the unfelled tree, not the timber
framed into the ship of state or carved into ecclesiastic grace. He
lives as Nature lives, putting on the splendor of green when the air
is sunny, and of crystal when the blasts sweep by; and while his roots
reach down into the earth, there rises nothing above him but the
heavens. Past experience shows that he may be harsh, prejudiced, and
unhappy; but it shows also that the richest human juices are within him,
and that not only the most peculiar and most sensitive, but also the
most highly-endowed characters are named in the list of authors. The
central and most admirable figure in this particular group of literary
men is Charles Lamb; and as each of the other groups clustered around
an organ, so at a later period Lamb and his associates supported the
"London Magazine," in which the "Essays of Elia" first appeared.