Personally, I became a member of the order of Wordsworthians in the
historic year 1891, when Matthew Arnold's "Selections" were issued to the
public at the price of half a crown. I suppose that Matthew Arnold and Sir
Leslie Stephen were the two sanest Wordsworthians of us all. And Matthew
Arnold put Wordsworth above all modern poets except Dante, Shakespeare,
Goethe, Milton, and Molière. The test of a Wordsworthian is the ability to
read with pleasure every line that the poet wrote. I regret to say that,
strictly, Matthew Arnold was not a perfect Wordsworthian; he confessed,
with manly sincerity, that he could not read "Vaudracour and Julia" with
pleasure. This was a pity and Matthew Arnold's loss. For a strict
Wordsworthian, while utterly conserving his reverence for the most poetic
of poets, can discover a keen ecstasy in the perusal of the unconsciously
funny lines which Wordsworth was constantly perpetrating. And I would back
myself to win the first prize in any competition for Wordsworth's funniest
line with a quotation from "Vaudracour and Julia." My prize-line would
assuredly be:

_Yea, his first word of greeting was,--_
_"All right...._

It is true that the passage goes on:

_Is gone from me...._

But that does not impair the magnificent funniness.

* * * * *

From his tenderest years Wordsworth succeeded in combining the virtues of
Milton and of _Punch_ in a manner that no other poet has approached. Thus,