As writers, while Wordsworth attains to lofty heights, with an appearance of effort; Milton is great inevitably, and inhales with pleasure the proud and rare atmosphere of the sublime; Wordsworth _comes up_ to the great--Milton _descends_ on it; Wordsworth has little ratiocinative, or rhetorical power; Milton discovers much of both--besides being able to grind his adversaries to powder by the hoof of invective, or to toss them into the air on the tusks of a terrible scorn; Wordsworth has produced many sublime lines, but no character approaching the sublime; Milton has reared up Satan to the sky--the most magnificent structure in the intellectual world; Wordsworth's philosophic vein is more subtle, and Milton's more masculine and strong; Wordsworth has written much in the shape of poetry that is despicably mean; mistaking it all the while for the excellent; Milton trifles seldom, and knows full well when he is trifling; Wordsworth has sometimes entangled himself with a poetic system; Milton no more than Samson will permit withes, however green, or a cart-rope, however new, to imprison his giant arms; Wordsworth has borrowed nothing, but timidly and jealously saved himself from theft by flight; Milton has maintained his originality, even while he borrows--he has dared to snatch the Urim and Thummim from the high-priest's breast, and inserted them among his own native ornaments, where they shine in keeping--unbedimming and unbedimmed; Wordsworth's prose is but a feeble counterpoise to his poetry; whereas Milton's were itself sufficient to perpetuate his name; Wordsworth's sonnets are, perhaps, equal to Milton's, some of his "Minor Poems" may approach "Lycidas," and "Il Penseroso," but where a whole like "Paradise Lost?" Thus while Wordsworth has left a name, the memory of a character and many works, which shall illustrate the age when he lived, and exalt him, on the whole, above all Britain's bards of that period, Milton is identified with the glory, not of an age, but of all ages; with the progress of liberty in the world--with the truth and grandeur of the Christian faith and with the honor and dignity of the human species itself. Wordsworth burns like the bright star Arcturus, outshining the fainter orbs of the constellation to which it belongs. Milton is one of those solitary oceans of flame, which seem to own but a dim and far-off relationship to aught else but the Great Being, who called them into existence. So truly did the one appreciate the other when he sung "Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." RATS AND RAT-KILLERS IN ENGLAND A rat! a rat! dead for a ducat.--_Hamlet_.