The reverence for man as man, the sympathy for him in his primary relations and his essential being, of which these comments on _Tam o' Shanter_ form so remarkable an example, is a habit of thought too ingrained in all Wordsworth's works to call for specific illustration. The figures of _Michael_, of _Matthew_, of the _Brothers_, of the hero of the _Excursion_, and even of the _Idiot Boy_, suggest themselves at once in this connexion. But it should be noted in each case how free is the poet's view from any idealization of the poorer classes as such, from the ascription of imaginary merits to an unknown populace which forms the staple of so much revolutionary eloquence. These poems, while they form the most convincing rebuke to the exclusive pride of the rich and great, are also a stern and strenuous incentive to the obscure and lowly. They are pictures of the poor man's life as it is,--pictures as free as Crabbe's from the illusion of sentiment,--but in which the delight of mere observation (which in Crabbe predominates) is subordinated to an intense sympathy with all such capacities of nobleness and tenderness as are called out by the stress and pressure of penury or woe. They form for the folk of northern England (as the works of Burns and Scott for the Scottish folk) a gallery of figures that are modelled, as it were, both from without and from within; by one with experience so personal as to keep every sentence vividly accurate, and yet with an insight which could draw from that simple life lessons to itself unknown. We may almost venture to generalize our statement further, and to assert that no writer since Shakespeare has left us so true a picture of the British nation. In Milton, indeed, we have the characteristic English spirit at a whiter glow; but it is the spirit of the scholar only, or of the ruler, not of the peasant, the woman, or the child, Wordsworth gives us that spirit as it is diffused among shepherds and husbandmen,--as it exists in obscurity and at peace. And they who know what makes the strength of nations need wish nothing better than that the temper which he saw and honoured among the Cumbrian dales should be the temper of all England, now and for ever. Our discussion of Wordsworth's form of Natural Religion has led us back by no forced transition to the simple life which he described and shared. I return to the story of his later years,--if that be called a story which derives no interest from incident or passion, and dwells only on the slow broodings of a meditative soul. CHAPTER XI ITALIAN TOUR--ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS--POLITICAL VIEWS--LAUREATESHIP.