Dennis had no competitor. Wordsworth, writing to Mr. Dyce says, "Pope, in that production of his boyhood, the Ode to Solitude, and in his Essay on Criticism, has furnished proofs that at one period of his life he felt the charm of a sober and subdued style, which he afterwards abandoned for one that is, to my taste at least, too pointed and ambitious, and for a versification too timidly balanced."[329] Southey and Coleridge accused Pope of debasing the public taste, but they agreed in laying the blame on his "meretricious" Homer, and excepted from their condemnation works which Wordsworth included in his censure. "The mischief," says Southey, "was effected not by Pope's satirical and moral pieces, for these entitle him to the highest place among poets of his class; it was by his Homer. No other work in the language so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry."[330] "In the course of one of my lectures," says Coleridge, "I had occasion to point out the almost faultless position and choice of words in Pope's original compositions, particularly in his Satires, and Moral Essays, for the purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which I do not stand alone in regarding as the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction."[331] Wordsworth loved simplicity of composition, and language not ornate. His preference for the Essay on Criticism would be intelligible if the piece had been free from adorned passages, and the strained attempt to be pointed in some of the similes; or if the style, in the quieter passages, had been consummate of its kind. Cowper has described the qualities which are essential to the highest excellence in this species of poetry. "Every man," he says, "conversant with verse-making, knows by painful experience that the familiar style is of all styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake."[332] Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, did not reach Cowper's standard, and far happier specimens of the style will be found in some of his Satires.