“the fairy way,” and convicts Voltaire out of the mouth of Addison, to whom he had appealed. And then, warming as he goes on, he pours his broadsides into the very _galère capitaine_ of the pirate fleet, the maxim “of following Nature.” “The source of bad criticism, as universally of bad philosophy, is the abuse of terms.”[144] A poet, no doubt, must follow “Nature”; but it is the nature of the poetical world, not of that of science and experience. Further, there is not only confusion general, but confusion particular. You must follow the ordinary nature in satire, in epigram, in didactics, _not_ in other kinds. _Incredulus odi_ has been absurdly misunderstood.[145] The “divine dream”[146] is among the noblest of the poet’s prerogatives. “The _Henriade_,” for want of it, “will in a short time be no more read than _Gondibert_.”[147] And he winds up a very intelligent account of Chaucer’s satire on Romance in _Sir Thopas_ by a still more intelligent argument, that it was only the abuse of Romance that Chaucer satirised, and by an at least plausible criticism of the advent of Good Sense, “Stooping with disenchanted wings to earth.” “What,” he concludes, “we have gotten is, you will say, a great deal of good sense; what we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the illusion of which is so grateful to the charmed spirit that, in spite of philosophy and fashion, ‘Fairy’ Spenser still ranks highest among the poets; I mean, with all those who are either come of that house, or have any kindness for it.” And now I should like to ask whether it is just or fair to say that the work of the man who wrote this thirty-three years before _Lyrical Ballads_ is “vapid and perverted,” that it is “empirical, dull, and preposterous,” and, at the best, “not very useful as criticism”? [Sidenote: _His real importance._]