While, however, the poetasters of the Popean descent[1] are now seen clearly enough to have fallen far short of the poetic stature of their time, they were widely read and admired, and in 1798, when Wordsworth prefaced the _Lyrical Ballads_ with the now famous but then slightly noted challenge to a false poetic diction, their example seemed no doubt to be a more dangerous influence than was in fact the case. If Wordsworth’s protest had never been explicitly made, we should have lost a masterpiece of critical prose, but English poetry would none the less surely have remained loyal to the principle that Wordsworth so earnestly advocated. The big men had never lost sight of it, nor were they in any general sense likely to. In attacking the windy pomposity that for a time stole poetic honours, with a power that flattered its importance, Wordsworth did not recognise that, among the more considerable poets, even those who were demonstrably touched by the falsity of style prevalent among their inferiors were at the same time preparing the reform of which he himself was the new and conscious gospeller. Gray who, as has been shown, could belabour his muse with any of them, and who was named by Wordsworth as a particular example for censure, did also write the _Elegy_, in which whatever lapses there may be are far more than atoned for in the main movement by the very purity of style which was the aim of Wordsworth’s pleading. Wordsworth’s cause was a just one, but it was also one that was obvious to the genius of English poetry, and the fact that he was as consciously preoccupied with it as he was is not without its reflection in his own creative work. He was sometimes ridden by his theory, and then the lovely simplicity that was the basis of a style that is at the height of English poetry lopped over into mere banality. But in his normal manner Wordsworth exemplified his critical position with complete success, and nowhere more strikingly than in his most inspired passages. The spoken English with which his creative mood was familiar must have been a blend drawn from the serious intellectualism of young literary society, the forthright simplicities of the northern dalesmen, where an old Biblical tradition coloured a natural austerity, with touches of paternal authority and undergraduate levity--or perhaps a little less than levity. It was the speech of a new England, sophisticated, politically self-conscious, rather heavily dialectical, but it was saved by the Bible, the dalesman, and a community of wit. It was such a speech, played upon by that knowledge of the poet’s literary ancestry which is a necessary agent always in the transmutation, that Wordsworth subdued exactly to his imaginative purposes.