he can afford to wait and let the world come round to him.
Wordsworth's conduct satisfies both these tests. It is, indeed,
curious to observe how much abuse this inoffensive recluse received,
and how absolutely he avoided returning it, Byron, for instance,
must have seemed in his eyes guilty of something far more injurious
to mankind than "a drowsy frowsy poem, called the _Excursion_,"
could possibly appear. But, except in one or two private letters,
Wordsworth has never alluded to Byron at all. Shelley's lampoon--a
singular instance of the random blows of a noble spirit, striking at
what, if better understood, it would eagerly have revered--
Wordsworth seems never to have read. Nor did the violent attacks of
the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly Reviews_ provoke him to any
rejoinder. To "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"--leagued against
him as their common prey--he opposed a dignified silence; and the
only moral injury which he derived from their assaults lay in that
sense of the absence of trustworthy external criticism which led him
to treat everything which he had once written down as if it were a
special revelation, and to insist with equal earnestness on his most
trifling as on his most important pieces--on _Goody Blake_ and
_The Idiot Boy_ as on _The Cuckoo_ or _The Daffodils_. The sense
of humour is apt to be the first grace which is lost under
persecution; and much of Wordsworth's heaviness and stiff exposition
of commonplaces is to be traced to a feeling, which he could
scarcely avoid, that "all day long he had lifted up his voice to a
perverse and gainsaying generation."

To the pecuniary loss inflicted on him by these adverse criticisms
he was justly sensible. He was far from expecting, or even desiring,
to be widely popular or to make a rapid fortune; but he felt that
the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that the devotion of years