If you have thoughts of marrying, do look out for some lady with a sufficient fortune for both of you.  What I say to you now I would recommend to every naval officer and clergyman who is without prospect of professional advancement.  Ladies of some fortune are as easily won as those without, and for the most part as deserving.  Check the first liking to those who have nothing.

One is tempted to say that Wordsworth, like so many other poets, died young, and that a pensioner who inherited his name survived him.

When one has told the worst about Wordsworth, however, one is as far as ever from having painted a portrait of him in which anybody could believe while reading the Ode on Intimations of Immortality—­Ode as it was simply called when it was first published—­or I wandered lonely as a cloud, or the sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge.  Nor does the portrait of a stern, unbending egotist satisfy us when we remember the life-long devotion that existed between him and Dorothy, and the fact that Coleridge loved him, and that Lamb and Scott were his friends.  He may have been a niggard of warm-heartedness to the outside world, but it is clear from his biography that he possessed the genius of a good heart as well as of a great mind.

And he was as conspicuous for the public as for the private virtues.  His latest biographer has done well to withdraw our eyes from the portrait of the old man with the stiffened joints and to paint in more glowing colours than any of his predecessors the early Wordsworth who rejoiced in the French Revolution, and, apparently as a consequence, initiated a revolution in English poetry.  The later period of the life is not glossed over; it is given, indeed, in cruel detail, and Professor Harper’s account of it is the most lively and fascinating part of his admirable book.  But it is to the heart of the young revolutionary, who dreamed of becoming a Girondist leader and of seeing England a republic, that he traces all the genius and understanding that we find in the poems.

“Wordsworth’s connection,” he writes, “with the English ‘Jacobins,’ with the most extreme element opposed to the war or actively agitating in favour of making England a republic, was much closer than has been generally admitted.”  He points out that Wordsworth’s first books of verse, An Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches, were published by Joseph Johnson, who also published Dr. Priestley, Horne Tooke, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and whose shop was frequented by Godwin and Paine.  Professor Harper attempts to strengthen his case by giving brief sketches of famous “Jacobins,” whom Wordsworth may or may not have met, but his case is strong enough without their help.  Wordsworth’s reply—­not published at the time, or, indeed, till after his death—­to the Bishop of Llandaff’s anti-French-Revolution sermon on The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor,