juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superiority of an austerer and
more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at present
possess. My judgment was stronger than were my powers of realizing its
dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to
a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic
colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world
then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in
unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.--During several
years of my youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had re-
introduced the manly simplicity of the Greek, and of our own elder
poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope seem presumptuous of
writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps a similar process has
happened to others; but my earliest poems were marked by an ease and
simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to
impress on my later compositions.

At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of
a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the
Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of
Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of
Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such
extracts as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of
Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and
brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds
of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority
of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and
diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic
poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they
were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring
up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even