At last, in 1814, the great poem was published upon which Wordsworth’s fame is built, viz., “The Excursion.” It was met, as usual, with tremendous and most indiscriminate abuse, especially by Jeffrey, in his “This won’t do” article. But despite all this, the poem grew deeply into the public mind, and is still growing there; and ranks, at last, with our highest poetry. All the characters and scenes in it are drawn from life, and there are few more interesting papers than the memoranda which the poet has left respecting these characters and their localities. “The Wanderer,” he acknowledges, is chiefly an embodied idea of what he fancied _his own character might have become_ in the said _Wanderer_’s circumstances. His sister, with her gentle love and sweet remonstrances,--although ready to follow him to the ends of the earth--did in reality save him from this wild nomadic life, by fixing his thoughts upon a _home_, and the genial influences which domestic life would produce and exercise upon his poetic genius. And then his wife, children, and the rich harvests of fortune, which were reaped without any sowing of his, and dropped into his lap, finished the work his sister had begun, and finally settled him as a citizen and a family man. Otherwise, being strong in body, I should, he says, very probably, have “taken to the way of life such as that in which my ‘Wanderer’ passed the greater part of his days.” Much, however, of what the “Wanderer” says and does, was the result, in verse, of the poet’s experience; was what he had actually heard and seen, although refined, of course, as it passed through his imagination. He was fond of talking to all kinds of strange characters;--now treading on the outskirts of social life, or wandering with a wild, vagabond independence amongst the highways of towns and cities. Whatever of romance and adventure they had known, he wormed out of them, or _charmed_ out of them; and he partially instances, as an illustration of this prying curiosity--this insatiable longing after experience, and the history of men--an old Scotchman, who married finally a relation of his wife’s, and settled down at Kendal, and a travelling packman, from whom he learned much, and whose adventures and wisdom are embodied in the character of the “Wanderer.” “The Solitary,” “The Pastor,” “Pedlar,” “Margaret,” “Miser,” and all the dramatis personæ of the poem, are made up of veritable human materials, and had their architypes in the great world of humanity. The reader, however, must go to Dr. Wordsworth for a full relation respecting these matters. All I can add here, respecting the “Excursion,” is that only 500 copies were disposed of in six years; and when, in 1827, another edition, of the same number of copies, was printed, it took seven years more to exhaust it. The poet, however, was not daunted by this culpable neglect of his immortal lines; but conscious of his own greatness, he