the meaning was as well or better given in derivatives of the Saxon. He
would have stricken out the "assemble" and left the "meet together." Like
Wesley, he might be compelled by necessity to a breach of the canon; but,
like him, he was never a willing schismatic, and his singing robes were
the full and flowing canonicals of the church by law established.
Inspiration makes short work with the usage of the best authors and
ready-made elegances of diction; but where Wordsworth is not possessed by
his demon, as Moliere said of Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage,
out-Miltons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes his diction beyond
Dryden. The fact was, that he took up his early opinions on instinct, and
insensibly modified them as he studied the masters of what may be called
the Middle Period of English verse.[2] As a young man, he disparaged
Virgil ("We talked a great deal of nonsense in those days," he said when
taken to task for it later in life); at fifty-nine he translated three
books of the Aeneid, in emulation of Dryden, though falling far short of
him in everything but closeness, as he seems, after a few years, to have
been convinced. Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true
founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan authority
save Milton, whose own English was formed upon those earlier models.
Keats denounced the authors of that style which came in toward the close
of the seventeenth century, and reigned absolute through the whole of the
eighteenth, as

"A schism,
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
... who went about
Holding a poor decrepit standard out,
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!"