In the same year Mr. Wordsworth received a pension of £300 a year from Sir Robert Peel's government, and permission to resign his office of Stamp Distributor in favor of his son. The remaining fifteen years of his life were therefore even less diversified by events of moment than any fifteen years previous had been. He seems henceforth to have surrendered himself wholly to the muse--and to contemplations suitable to his own habits of mind and to the lovely country in which he lived. This course of life, however, was varied by a tour to Italy in company with his friend, Mr. Crabb Robinson. The result of his visit, as far as poetry is concerned, was not remarkable. On Southey's death Mr. Wordsworth was appointed Poet Laureate: an appropriate appointment, if such an office was to be retained at all--for the laurel dignified by the brows of Ben Johnson, Davenant, Dryden, Tom Warton, and Southey, had been sullied and degraded by appearing on the unworthy temples of Tate, Eusden, Whitehead, and Pye. Once, and once only, did Wordsworth sing in discharge of his office--on the occasion of Her Majesty's visit to the University of Cambridge. There is more obscurity, however, than poetry in what he wrote. Indeed, the Ode in question must be looked on as another addition to the numerous examples that we possess of how poor a figure the Muse invariably makes when the occasion of her appearance is such as the poet himself would not have selected for a voluntary invocation. If Wordsworth was unfortunate--as he certainly was--in not finding any recognition of his merits till his hair was gray, he was luckier than other poets similarly situated have been in living to, a good old age, and in the full enjoyment of the amplest fame which his youthful dreams had ever pictured. His admirers have perhaps carried their idolatry too far: but there can be no doubt of the high position which he must always hold among British Poets. His style is simple, unaffected, and vigorous--his blank verse manly and idiomatic--his sentiments both noble and pathetic--and his images poetic and appropriate. His sonnets are among the finest in the language: Milton's scarcely finer. "I think," says Coleridge, "that Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position which is peculiarly--perhaps I might say exclusively--fitted for him. His proper title is _Spectator ab extra_."