Nor is this to consider too curiously; Wordsworth himself has invited us to the task. In his letters as well as in the notes to his poems, frequent mention is made of these labors of emendation. Writing in 1837 to Edward Quillinan, he asks him to "take the trouble ... of comparing the corrections in my last edition [that of 1836] with the text in the preceding one," "in the correction of which I took great pains," as he had written to Prof. Reed a month before. And there is ample opportunity of this sort; I do not know an ampler one of the kind in the works of any other poet. Tasso's _variæ lectiones_ are numerous, but they were mostly made to conciliate his critics; Milton's are of great interest, but they are comparatively few in number, and Gray's are fewer still: Pope's are numerous, but not often interesting; while Tennyson's, as I have intimated, seem to me to spring from a less serious poetic faculty than Wordsworth's, and are therefore less significant. But I am anxious not to claim too much significance for Wordsworth's corrections, for I can do little more here than to point out some of them, leaving for the most part their interpretation to the reader. To attempt more than this would be to enter upon an analysis of Wordsworth's genius, for which this is not the occasion. And yet we shall see, I think, that his genius might be in some sort "restored," as naturalists say, were it necessary, from these fragmentary data, for Wordsworth's corrections cover the whole term of his literary activity. He preferred, one might say, to correct after publication rather than before; and, revising his youthful writing during a second and a third generation following, his final texts had received the benefit of more than half a century of criticism by himself and others. From the year 1793, in which his first volumes appeared, the "Evening Walk" and the "Descriptive Sketches," to the year of his death, 1850, he put forth not fewer than twenty-four separate publications in verse, each of which contained more or less of poetry previously unpublished; and in the greater number of these texts may be found variations from the previous readings. The larger part of them, indeed, are slight--the change of single words, the alteration of phrases, the transposition of verses or stanzas. And yet few of them, I think, are quite without interest for persons in whose reading, as Wordsworth himself expresses it, "poetry has continued to be comprehended as a study." I have noted some thousands of his corrections; but a copious citation of them might weary all but actual students of poetic _technique_, a class that is hardly as numerous, I suspect, as that of the actual practitioners of poetry, and I will therefore keep mainly to such _variæ lectiones_ as may be referred to motives of more general interest.[B]