The end of criticism is less law-giving than conversion.  It teaches not the legalities, but the love, of literature. Biographia Literaria does this in its most admirable parts by interesting us in Coleridge’s own literary beginnings, by emphasizing the strong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty animosities of little ones, by pointing out the signs of the miracle of genius in the young Shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of Wordsworth from a hundred extravagances of theory and practice.  Coleridge’s remarks on the irritability of minor poets—­“men of undoubted talents, but not of genius,” whose tempers are “rendered yet more irritable by their desire to appear men of genius”—­should be written up on the study walls of everyone commencing author.  His description, too, of his period as “this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with sort of Egyptian superstition if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail,” conveys a warning to writers that is not of an age but for all time.  Coleridge may have exaggerated the “manly hilarity” and “evenness and sweetness of temper” of men of genius.  But there is no denying that, the smaller the genius, the greater is the spite of wounded self-love.  “Experience informs us,” as Coleridge says, “that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.”  As for Coleridge’s great service to Wordsworth’s fame, it was that of a gold-washer.  He cleansed it from all that was false in Wordsworth’s reaction both in theory and in practice against “poetic diction.”  Coleridge pointed out that Wordsworth had misunderstood the ultimate objections to eighteenth-century verse.  The valid objection to a great deal of eighteenth-century verse was not, he showed, that it was written in language different from that of prose, but that it consisted of “translations of prose thoughts into poetic language.”  Coleridge put it still more strongly, indeed, when he said that “the language from Pope’s translation of Homer to Darwin’s Temple of Nature may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no better reason than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose.”  Wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against the meretricious garb of mean thoughts, wished to deny verse its more splendid clothing altogether.  If we accepted his theories we should have to condemn his Ode, the greatest of his sonnets, and, as Coleridge put it, “two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry.”  The truth is, Wordsworth created an engine that was in danger of destroying not only Pope but himself.  Coleridge destroyed the engine and so helped to save Wordsworth.  Coleridge may, in his turn, have gone too far in dividing language into three groups—­language peculiar to poetry, language peculiar to prose, and language common to both, though there is much to be said for the division; but his jealousy for the great tradition in language was the jealousy of a sound critic.  “Language,” he declared, “is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.”