80. I therefore respectfully venture to intimate to my bucolic friends, that I know, more vitally by far than they, what _is_ in Wordsworth, and what is not. Any man who chooses to live by his precepts will thankfully find in them a beauty and rightness, (_exquisite_ rightness I called it, in "Sesame and Lilies,") which will preserve him alike from mean pleasure, vain hope, and guilty deed: so that he will neither mourn at the gate of the fields which with covetous spirit he sold, nor drink of the waters which with yet more covetous spirit he stole, nor devour the bread of the poor in secret, nor set on his guest-table the poor man's lamb:--in all these homely virtues and assured justices let him be Wordsworth's true disciple; and he will then be able with equanimity to hear it said, when there is need to say so, that his excellent master often wrote verses that were not musical, and sometimes expressed opinions that were not profound. And the need to say so becomes imperative when the unfinished verse, and uncorrected fancy, are advanced by the affection of his disciples into places of authority where they give countenance to the popular national prejudices from the infection of which, in most cases, they themselves sprang. 81. Take, for example, the following three and a half lines of the 38th Ecclesiastical Sonnet:-- "Amazement strikes the crowd; while many turn Their eyes away in sorrow, others burn With scorn, invoking a vindictive ban From outraged Nature." The first quite evident character of these lines is that they are extremely bad iambics,--as ill-constructed as they are unmelodious; the turning and burning being at the wrong ends of them, and the ends themselves put just when the sentence is in its middle. But a graver fault of these three and a half lines is that the amazement, the turning, the burning, and the banning, are all alike fictitious; and foul-fictitious, calumniously conceived no less than falsely. Not one of the spectators of the scene referred to was in reality amazed--not one contemptuous, not one maledictory. It is only our gentle minstrel of the meres who sits in the seat of the scornful--only the hermit of Rydal Mount who invokes the malison of Nature. What the scene verily was, and how witnessed, it will not take long to tell; nor will the tale be useless: but I must first refer the reader to a period preceding, by nearly a century, the great symbolic action under the porch of St. Mark's.