Perhaps for want of light and shade, and the unshackled spirit of the drama, this performance was never brought forward.  Our critic has a great dislike to Gray, and a fondness for Thomson and Collins.  It is mortifying to hear him speak of Pope and Dryden, whom, because they have been supposed to have all the possible excellences of poetry, he will allow to have none.  Nothing, however, can be fairer, or more amusing, than the way in which he sometimes exposes the unmeaning verbiage of modern poetry.  Thus, in the beginning of Dr. Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes—­

  “Let observation with extensive view
  Survey mankind from China to Peru”—­

he says there is a total want of imagination accompanying the words, the same idea is repeated three times under the disguise of a different phraseology:  it comes to this—­“let observation, with extensive observation, observe mankind;” or take away the first line, and the second,

  “Survey mankind from China to Peru,”

literally conveys the whole.  Mr. Wordsworth is, we must say, a perfect Drawcansir as to prose writers.  He complains of the dry reasoners and matter-of-fact people for their want of passion; and he is jealous of the rhetorical declaimers and rhapsodists as trenching on the province of poetry.  He condemns all French writers (as well of poetry as prose) in the lump.  His list in this way is indeed small.  He approves of Walton’s Angler, Paley, and some other writers of an inoffensive modesty of pretension.  He also likes books of voyages and travels, and Robinson Crusoe.  In art, he greatly esteems Bewick’s wood-cuts, and Waterloo’s sylvan etchings.  But he sometimes takes a higher tone, and gives his mind fair play.  We have known him enlarge with a noble intelligence and enthusiasm on Nicolas Poussin’s fine landscape-compositions, pointing out the unity of design that pervades them, the superintending mind, the imaginative principle that brings all to bear on the same end; and declaring he would not give a rush for any landscape that did not express the time of day, the climate, the period of the world it was meant to illustrate, or had not this character of wholeness in it.  His eye also does justice to Rembrandt’s fine and masterly effects.  In the way in which that artist works something out of nothing, and transforms the stump of a tree, a common figure into an ideal object, by the gorgeous light and shade thrown upon it, he perceives an analogy to his own mode of investing the minute details of nature with an atmosphere of sentiment; and in pronouncing Rembrandt to be a man of genius, feels that he strengthens his own claim to the title.  It has been said of Mr. Wordsworth, that “he hates conchology, that he hates the Venus of Medicis.”  But these, we hope, are mere epigrams and jeux-d’esprit, as far from truth as they are free from malice; a sort of running satire or critical clenches—­