It begins with sufficient boldness and originality (indeed “W. W.” was never deficient in either) with admission that “by writing in verse, an author is supposed to make a formal engagement that he will gratify certain habits of association,” and merely urging that these habits have varied remarkably. The principle here is sound enough; it is in effect the same which we have traced in previous “romantic” criticism from Shenstone onwards; but the historical illustrations are unfortunate. They are “the age of Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius” contrasted with that of Statius and Claudian, and “the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher” with that of Donne and Cowley or Dryden and Pope. The _nisus_ of the school towards the historic argument, and, at the same time, its imperfect education in literary history, could hardly be better illustrated. For, not to quibble about the linking of Statius and Claudian, the age of Catullus and Lucretius was most certainly _not_ the age of Terence; and the English pairs are still more luckless. Donne _and_ Cowley, Shakespeare _and_ Beaumont and Fletcher, are bad enough in themselves: but the postponement of Donne to the twin dramatists, when he was the elder of Fletcher probably by six or seven years, of Beaumont by ten or twelve, is rather sad. However, it is not on history that Wordsworth bases his attack. [Sidenote: _The argument against poetic diction, and even against metre._] His object, he tells us, was to choose incidents and illustrations from common life; to relate and describe them, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect—a long but much less forcible appendix examining why the life so chosen was not merely “ordinary,” but “rustic and humble.” The kernel of his next paragraph is the famous statement that all good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and then, after a little divagation, he sets to work to show how such a style as he was using was adapted to be the channel of such an overflow. He utterly refuses Personification: he “has taken as much pains to avoid what is called Poetic Diction as is ordinarily taken to produce it”; he “has at all times endeavoured to look steadily at the subject with little falsehood of description”; and he has not only denied himself false poetic diction, but many expressions in themselves proper and beautiful, which have been foolishly repeated by bad poets till they became disgusting. A selected sonnet from Gray[351] is then rather captiously attacked for the sake of showing (what certainly few will admit) that, in its only part of value, the language differs in no respect from that of prose: whence the heretic goes farther and, first asserting that there is _no_ essential difference between the language of Prose and that of Poetry, proceeds in