North.—­Your habitual contemplation of his merits has confused you into a notion that they are your own, and you think him an usurper of the laurel crown that is yours by the divine right of genius.  What an unhappy monomania!  Still, your application for redress to us is unaccountable.  You should know that we Black Foresters, lawless as you may suppose us, are Wordsworth’s liegemen.  He is our intellectual Chief.  We call him the General!  We are ever busy in promoting his fame.

Landor.—­You are always blowing hot and cold on it, and have done so for years past.  One month you place him among the stars, the next as low as the daisies.

North.—­And rightly too; for both are the better for his presence.

Landor.—­But you alternately worship and insult him, as some people do their wooden idols.

North.—­If you must learn the truth, then, he has been to us, in one sense, nothing better than an unfeeling wooden idol.  Some of us have been provoked by his indifference to our powers of annoyance, and his ingratitude in not repaying eulogy in kind.  We have among ourselves a gander or two, (no offence, Mr. Landor,) that, forgetting they are webfooted, pretend to a perch on the tall bay-tree of Apollo, and, though heavy of wing, are angry with Wordsworth for not encouraging their awkward flights.  They, like you, accuse him of jealousy, forsooth!  That is the reason that they are now gabbling at his knees, now hissing at his heels.  Moreover, our caprices are not unuseful to our interests.  We alternately pique and soothe readers by them, and so keep our customers.  As day is partitioned between light and darkness, so has the public taste as to Wordsworth been divided between his reverers and the followers of the Jeffrey heresy.  After a lengthened winter, Wordsworth’s glory is now in the long summer days; all good judgments that lay torpid have been awakened, and the light prevails against the darkness.  But as bats and owls, the haters of light, are ever most restless in the season when nights are shortest, so are purblind egotists most uneasy when their dusky range is contracted by the near approach and sustained ascendancy of genius.  We now put up a screen for the weak-sighted, now withdraw it from stronger eyes; thus we plague and please all parties.

Landor.—­Except Wordsworth, whose eyelids are too tender to endure his own lustre reflected and doubled on the focus of your burnished brass.  He dreads the fate of Milton, “blasted with excess of light.”

North.  Thank you, sir; that is an ingenious way of accounting for Wordsworth’s neglect of our luminous pages.  Yet it rather sounds like irony, coming from Mr. Walter Savage Landor to the editor of “The (Not Gentleman’s) Magazine.”

Landor.—­Pshaw! still harping on my Satire.