Romantic criticism, both in its end and its method, differs widely from that of Dr. Johnson and his school.  Wordsworth and Coleridge were concerned with deep-seated qualities and temperamental differences.  Their critical work revolved round their conception of the fancy and the imagination, the one dealing with nature on the surface and decorating it with imagery, the other penetrating to its deeper significances.  Hazlitt and Lamb applied their analogous conception of wit as a lower quality than humour, in the same fashion.  Dr. Johnson looked on the other hand for correctness of form, for the subordination of the parts to the whole, for the self-restraint and good sense which common manners would demand in society, and wisdom in practical life.  His school cared more for large general outlines than for truth in detail.  They would not permit the idiosyncrasy of a personal or individual point of view:  hence they were incapable of understanding lyricism, and they preferred those forms of writing which set themselves to express the ideas and feelings that most men may be supposed to have in common.  Dr. Johnson thought a bombastic and rhetorical passage in Congreve’s Mourning Bride better than the famous description of Dover cliff in King Lear.  “The crows, sir,” he said of the latter, “impede your fall.”  Their town breeding, and possibly, as we saw in the case of Dr. Johnson, an actual physical disability, made them distrust any clear and sympathetic rendering of the sense impressions which nature creates.  One cannot imagine Dr. Johnson caring much for the minute observations of Tennyson’s nature poems, or delighting in the verdurous and mossy alleys of Keats.  His test in such a case would be simple; he would not have liked to have been in such places, nor reluctantly compelled to go there would he in all likelihood have had much to say about them beyond that they were damp.  For the poetry—­such as Shelley’s—­which worked by means of impalpable and indefinite suggestion, he would, one may conceive, have cared even less.  New modes of poetry asked of critics new sympathies and a new way of approach.  But it is time to turn to the authors themselves.

(2)

The case of Wordsworth is peculiar.  In his own day he was vilified and misunderstood; poets like Byron, whom most of us would now regard simply as depending from the school he created, sneered at him.  Shelley and Keats failed to understand him or his motives; he was suspected of apostasy, and when he became poet laureate he was written off as a turn-coat who had played false to the ideals of his youth.  Now common opinion regards him as a poet above all the others of his age, and amongst all the English poets standing beside Milton, but a step below Shakespeare himself—­and we know more about him, more about the processes by which his soul moved from doubts to certainties, from troubles to triumph, than we do about any other author we have.  This knowledge