and beauty_. It is the one exception to the critical dictum that all
his good work was done in the decade between 1798 and 1808. He lived
for more than thirty years after this fine composition. But he added
nothing more of value to the work that he had already done. The public
appreciation of it was very slow. The most influential among the
critics were for long hostile and contemptuous. Never at any time did
Wordsworth come near to such popularity as that of Scott or of Byron.
Nor was this all. For many years most readers of poetry thought more
even of _Lalla Rookh_ than of the _Excursion_. While Scott, Byron, and
Moore were receiving thousands of pounds, Wordsworth received nothing.
Between 1830 and 1840 the current turned in Wordsworth's direction,
and when he received the honour of a doctor's degree at the Oxford
Commemoration in 1839, the Sheldonian theatre made him the hero of the
day. In the spring of 1843 Southey died, and Sir Robert Peel pressed
Wordsworth to succeed him in the office of Poet-Laureate. "It is a
tribute of respect," said the Minister, "justly due to the first
of living poets." But almost immediately the light of his common
popularity was eclipsed by Tennyson, as it had earlier been eclipsed
by Scott, by Byron, and in some degree by Shelley. Yet his fame among
those who know, among competent critics with a right to judge, to-day
stands higher than it ever stood. Only two writers have contributed so
many lines of daily popularity and application. In the handbooks of
familiar quotations Wordsworth fills more space than anybody save
Shakespeare and Pope. He exerted commanding influence over great minds
that have powerfully affected our generation. "I never before," said
George Eliot in the days when her character was forming itself (1839),
"met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I should like
them," and her reverence for Wordsworth remained to the end. J.S. Mill
has described how important an event in his life was his first reading
of Wordsworth. "What made his poems a medicine for my state of mind