any expressions; or, at least, no one who is capable of estimating those
higher merits, will be disposed to mark these little defects. But, in
good truth, no man, now-a-days, composes verses for publication with a
slovenly neglect of their language. It is a fine and laborious
manufacture, which can scarcely ever be made in a hurry; and the faults
which it has, may, for the most part, be set down to bad taste or
incapacity, rather than to carelessness or oversight. With Mr Wordsworth
and his friends, it is plain that their peculiarities of diction are
things of choice, and not of accident. They write as they do, upon
principle and system; and it evidently costs them much pains to keep
_down_ to the standard which they have proposed to themselves. They are,
to the full, as much mannerists, too, as the poetasters who ring changes
on the common-places of magazine versification; and all the difference
between them is, that they borrow their phrases from a different and a
scantier _gradus ad Parnassum_. If they were, indeed, to discard all
imitation and set phraseology, and to bring in no words merely for show
or for metre,--as much, perhaps, might be gained in freedom and
originality, as would infallibly be lost in allusion and authority; but,
in point of fact, the new poets are just as great borrowers as the old;
only that, instead of borrowing from the more popular passages of their
illustrious predecessors, they have preferred furnishing themselves from
vulgar ballads and plebeian nurseries.

Their peculiarities of diction alone, are enough, perhaps, to render
them ridiculous; but the author before us really seems anxious to court
this literary martyrdom by a device still more infallible,--we mean,
that of connecting his most lofty, tender, or impassioned conceptions,
with objects and incidents, which the greater part of his readers will
probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting. Whether this
is done from affectation and conceit alone, or whether it may not