The range of poetry is indeed inexhaustible, and even the greatest poets must suffer some subtraction from universal pre-eminence. Therefore we may frankly admit the deficiencies of Wordsworth,--that he was lacking in dramatic force and in the power of characterization; that he was singularly deficient in humor, and therefore in the saving grace of self-criticism in the capacity to see himself occasionally in a ridiculous light; that he has little of the romantic glamor and none of the narrative energy of Scott; that Shelley's lyrical flights leave him plodding along the dusty highway; and that Byron's preternatural force makes his passion seen by contrast pale and ineffectual. All this and more may freely be granted, and yet for his influence upon English thought, and especially upon the poetic thought of his country, he must be named after Shakespeare and Milton. The intellectual value of his work will endure; for leaving aside much valuable doctrine, which from didactic excess fails as poetry, he has brought into the world a new philosophy of Nature and has emphasised in a manner distinctively his own the dignity of simple manhood.--_Pelham Edgar_. REFERENCES ON WORDSWORTH'S LIFE AND WORKS _Wordsworth_ by F. W. H. Myers, in _English Men of Letters_ series. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. _Wordsworth_ by Walter Raleigh, London: Edward Arnold. _Wordsworth_ by Rosaline Masson, in _The People's Books_ series. London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, _Wordsworthiana_ edited by William Knight. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. _Essays Chiefly on Poetry_ by Aubrey de Vere, 2 volumes. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. _Literary Essays_ by Richard Holt Hutton. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. _Studies in Literature_ by Edward Dowden. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd. _Aspects of Poetry_ by J. S. C. Shairp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company. _Lives of Great English Writers from Chaucer to Browning_ by Walter S. Hinchman and Francis B. Gummere. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. _Great English Poets_ by Julian Hill. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co. _The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_ by William Morton Payne. New York: Henry Holt and Company. _The Religious Spirit in the Poets_ by W. Boyd Carpenter, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, _Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson_ by Francis T. Palgrave. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. _A History of Nineteenth Century Literature_ by George Saintsbury. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. _Personal Traits of British Authors_ by E. T. Mason. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. _The English Poets_ edited by T. Humphrey Ward, Vol. iv. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. _Selections from Wordsworth_ edited by Matthew Arnold in _The Golden Treasury Series_. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.