With better reason than Southey and Landor, Wordsworth nourished in his breast a sublime self-complacency, and, in spite of adverse criticisms, wrote calmly on, ‘in the full assurance that his poems would be unpopular, and in the full assurance that they would be immortal.’ To a friend who wrote condoling with him about the severity with which his poems were criticised in the _Edinburgh Review_, he replied: ‘Trouble not yourself about their present reception; of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny? To console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the young and gracious of every age to see, to think, and to feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous—this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we—that is, all that is mortal of us—are mouldering in our graves.’ Again: ‘I doubt not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my writings, and among them these little poems, will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society, wherever found, and that they will, in their degree, be efficacious in making men happier and wiser.’ Byron, to whom Macaulay denied the possession of any high critical faculty, was no better judge of his own poetry than he was of other people’s. His _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_ he thought inferior to his _Hints from Horace_, a feeble imitation of Pope and Johnson, which he repeatedly designed to publish, and was withheld from doing only by the solicitations of his friends, whom, to his astonishment, he could never bring to think of the matter as he did. Scott, who had few of the weaknesses common to literary men, was free from any tendency to unduly estimate his own writings. He always said that his poetry would never live, and was not to be compared with that of many of his contemporaries. He felt that though Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley were then comparatively neglected, the time would come when they would be recognised as having possessed more of the sacred fire of inspiration than he. ‘I promise you,’ he says in an epistle to an old friend, ‘my oaks will outlast my laurels; and I pique myself more on my compositions for manure, than on any other compositions to which I was ever accessory.’ This was, of course, in great part badinage. But he repeatedly, both in writing and conversation, placed literature below some other professions, and especially the military, of whose greatest representative then living, the Duke of Wellington, his admiration knew no bounds.