Lancrigg, November.—­Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth took an early dinner with us on the 26th of this month.  He was very vigorous, and spoke of his majority at Glasgow, also of his reception at Oxford.  He told us of an application he had just had from a Glasgow publisher that he should write a sonnet in praise of Fergusson and Allan Ramsay, to prefix to a new edition of those Poets which was about to appear.  He intended to reply, that Burns’s lines to Fergusson would be a much more appropriate tribute than anything he could write; and he went on to say that Burns owed much to Fergusson, and that he had taken the plan of many of his poems from Fergusson, and the measure also.  He did not think this at all detracted from the merit of Burns, for he considered it a much higher effort of genius to excel in degree, than to strike out what may be called an original poem.  He spoke highly of the purity of language of the Scotch poets of an earlier period, Gavin Douglass and others, and said that they greatly excelled the English poets, after Chaucer, which he attributed to the distractions of England during the wars of York and Lancaster.

December 25th, 1846.—­My mother and I called at Rydal Mount yesterday early, to wish our dear friends the blessings of the season.  Mrs. W. met us at the door most kindly, and we found him before his good fire in the dining-room, with a flock of robins feasting at the window.  He had an old tattered book in his hand; and as soon as he had given us a cordial greeting, he said, in a most animated manner, ’I must read to you what Mary and I have this moment finished.  It is a passage in the Life of Thomas Elwood.’  He then read to us the following extract: 

’Some little time before I went to Alesbury prison, I was desired by my quondam master, Milton, to take an house for him in the neighbourhood where I dwell, that he might get out of the city, for the safety of himself and his family, the pestilence then growing hot in London.  I took a pretty box for him in Giles-Chalford, a mile from me, of which I gave him notice; and intended to have waited on him, and seen him well settled in it, but was prevented by that imprisonment.

’But now being released, and returned home, I soon made a visit to him, to welcome him into the country.

’After some common discourses had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his, which being brought, he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my leisure; and when I had so done, return it to him with my judgment thereupon.

’When I came home, and had set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he entituled ‘Paradise Lost.’  After I had with the best attention read it through, I made him another visit, and returned him his book with due acknowledgment of the favour he had done me in communicating it to me.  He asked me how I liked it, and what I thought of it, which I modestly, but freely told him; and after