George III. did little, either by example or by generosity, to foster literary culture:  his son, while nominally encouraging authors, did much to injure the tone of letters in his day.  But literature was now becoming independent and self-sustaining:  it needed to look no longer wistfully for a monarch’s smile:  it cared comparatively little for the court:  it issued its periods and numbers directly to the English people:  it wrote for them and of them; and when, in 1830, the last of the Georges died, after an ill-spent life, in which his personal pleasures had concerned him far more than the welfare of his people, former prescriptions and prejudices rapidly passed away; and the new epoch in general improvement and literary culture, which had already begun its course, received a marvellous impulsion.

The great movement, in part unconscious, from the artificial rhetoric of the former age towards the simplicity of nature, was now to receive its strongest propulsion:  it was to be preached like a crusade; to be reduced to a system, and set forth for the acceptance of the poetical world:  it was to meet with criticism, and even opprobrium, because it had the arrogance to declare that old things had entirely passed away, and that all things must conform themselves to the new doctrine.  The high-priest of this new poetical creed was Wordsworth:  he proposed and expounded it; he wrote according to its tenets; he defended his illustrations against the critics by elaborate prefaces and essays.  He boldly faced the clamor of a world in arms; and what there was real and valuable in his works has survived the fierce battle, and gathered around him an army of proselytes, champions, and imitators.

WORDSWORTH.—­William Wordsworth was the son of the law-agent to the Earl of Lonsdale; he was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770.  It was a gifted family.  His brother, Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, was Master of Trinity College.  Another, the captain of an East Indiaman, was lost at sea in his own ship.  He had also a clever sister, who was the poet’s friend and companion as long as she lived.

Wordsworth and his companions have been called the Lake Poets, because they resided among the English lakes.  Perhaps too much has been claimed for the Lake country, as giving inspiration to the poets who lived there:  it is beautiful, but not so surpassingly so as to create poets as its children.  The name is at once arbitrary and convenient.

Wordsworth was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1787; but whenever he could escape from academic restraints, he indulged his taste for pedestrian excursions:  during these his ardent mind became intimate and intensely sympathetic with nature, as may be seen in his Evening Walk, in the sketch of the skater, and in the large proportion of description in all his poems.

It is truer of him than perhaps of any other author, that the life of the man is the best history of the poet.  All that is eventful and interesting in his life may be found translated in his poetry.  Milton had said that the poet’s life should be a grand poem.  Wordsworth echoed the thought: