From Letters of Professor Tayler (1872).

     Anecdote of Crabbe and Wordsworth.

     Wordsworth’s Later Opinion of Lord Brougham.

[12] Will the Reader indulgently correct a most unfortunate oversight of the printers in vol. iii. p. 497, l. 15, where ‘no angel smiled’ (mis)reads ‘no angle smiled’?

These are included in the Prose inevitably, inasmuch as they preserve opinions and sentiments, criticisms and sayings, actually spoken by WORDSWORTH, of exactly the type of which Lord COLERIDGE, among other things, wrote the Editor:  ’I hope we shall have a transcript from you of the thoughts and opinions of that very great and noble person, of whom (as far as I know them) it is most true that “the very dust of his writings is gold.”  Any grave and deliberate opinion of his is entitled to weight; and if we have his opinions at all, we should have them whole and entire.’

The Editor has studied to give WORDSWORTH’S own conversations and sayings—­not others’ concerning him.  Hence such eloquent pseudo-enthusiasm as is found in De Quincey’s ’Recollections of the Lakes’ (Works, vol. ii.) is excluded.  He dares to call it pseudo-enthusiasm; for this book of the little, alert, self-conscious creature, with the marvellous brain and more marvellous tongue—­a monkey with a man’s soul somehow transmigrated into it—­opens and shuts without preserving a solitary saying of the man he professes to honour.  That is a measure of his admiration as of his insight or no insight.  There are besides personal impertinencies, declarative of essential vulgarity.[13] Smaller men have printed their ‘Recollections,’ or rather retailed their gossip; but they themselves occupy the foreground, much as your chimney-sweep introduces himself prominently in front of his signboard presentment of some many-chimneyed ‘noble house.’  Even Emerson’s ‘English Traits’ (a most un-English book) belongs to the same underbred category.  The new ‘Recollections’ by AUBREY DE VERE, Esq., it is a privilege to publish—­full of reverence and love, and so daintily and musically worded, as they are.

[13] Possibly indignation roused by the ‘Recollections’ has provoked too vehement condemnation.  Let it therefore be noted that it is the ‘Recollections’ that are censured.  Elsewhere DE QUINCEY certainly shows a glimmering recognition of WORDSWORTH’S great qualities, and that before they had been fully admitted; but everywhere there is an impertinence of familiarity and a patronising self-consciousness that is irritating to any one who reverences great genius and high rectitude.  It may be conceded that DE QUINCEY, so far as he was capable, did reverence WORDSWORTH; but his exaggerations of awe and delays bear on the face of them unveracity.