ear to the language of admiration coupled with the name of Wordsworth.
This began with Professor Wilson; and well I remember--nay, the proofs
are still easy to hunt up--that, for eight or ten years, this
singularity of opinion, having no countenance from other journals, was
treated as a whim, a paradox, a bold extravagance, of the
_Blackwood_ critics. Mr. Wordsworth's neighbors in Westmoreland,
who had (generally speaking) a profound contempt for him, used to rebut
the testimony of _Blackwood_ by one constant reply--"Ay, _Blackwood_
praises Wordsworth, but who else praises him?" In short, up to 1820,
the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot; from 1820 to 1830, it
was militant; from 1830 to 1835, it has been triumphant. In 1803, when
I entered at Oxford, that name was absolutely unknown; and the finger
of scorn, pointed at it in 1802 by the first or second number of the
_Edinburgh Review_, failed to reach its mark from absolute defect of
knowledge in the public mind. Some fifty beside myself knew who was
meant by "that poet who had cautioned his friend against growing
double," etc.; to all others it was a profound secret.

These things must be known and understood properly to value the
prophetic eye and the intrepidity of two persons, like Professor Wilson
and myself, who, in 1802-3, attached themselves to a banner not yet
raised and planted; who outran, in fact, their contemporaries by one
entire generation; and did _that_ about 1802 which the rest of the
world are doing in chorus about 1832.

Professor Wilson's period at Oxford exactly coincided with my own; yet,
in that large world, we never met. I know, therefore, but little of his
policy in regard to such opinions or feelings as tended to dissociate
him from the mass of his coevals. This only I know, that he lived as it
were in public; and must, therefore, I presume, have practised a