thought, feeling, and spontaneous song.  It was Burns who showed Wordsworth’s own youth “How verse may build a princely throne on humble truth.”  Nor can we understand how Cowper is to be set down as simply a man of letters.  We may, too, if we please, deny the name of poetry to Collins’s tender and pensive Ode to Evening; but we can only do this on critical principles, which would end in classing the author of Lycidas and Comus, of the Allegro and Penseroso, as a writer of various accomplishments and great general ability, but at bottom simply a man of letters and by no means a poet.  It is to Gray, however, that we must turn for the distinctive character of the best poetry of the eighteenth century.  With reluctance we will surrender the Pindaric Odes, though not without risking the observation that some of Wordsworth’s own criticism on Gray is as narrow and as much beside the mark as Jeffrey’s on the Excursion.  But the Ode on Eton College is not to have grudged to it the noble name and true quality of poetry, merely because, as one of Johnson’s most unfortunate criticisms expresses it, the ode suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel.  To find beautiful and pathetic language, set to harmonious numbers, for the common impressions of meditative minds, is no small part of the poet’s task.  That part has never been achieved by any poet in any tongue with more complete perfection and success than in the immortal Elegy, of which we may truly say that it has for nearly a century and a half given to greater multitudes of men more of the exquisite pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in all the glorious treasury of English verse.  It abounds, as Johnson says, “with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”  These moving commonplaces of the human lot Gray approached through books and studious contemplation; not, as Wordsworth approached them, by daily contact with the lives and habit of men and the forces and magical apparitions of external nature.  But it is a narrow view to suppose that the men of the eighteenth century did not look through the literary conventions of the day to the truths of life and nature behind them.  The conventions have gone, or are changed, and we are all glad of it.  Wordsworth effected a wholesome deliverance when he attacked the artificial diction, the personifications, the allegories, the antitheses, the barren rhymes and monotonous metres, which the reigning taste had approved.  But while welcoming the new freshness, sincerity, and direct and fertile return on nature, that is a very bad reason why we should disparage poetry so genial, so simple, so humane, and so perpetually pleasing, as the best verse of the rationalistic century.