Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II SOUTHEY AND PORSON. Parson. I suspect, Mr. Southey, you arc angry with me for the ireedom with which I have spoken of your poetry and Wordsworth’s. Southey. What could have induced you to imagine it, Mr. Professor ? You have indeed bent your eyes upon me, since we have heen together, with somewhat of fierceness and defiance; I presume you fancied me to be a commentator. You wrong me, in your belief that any opinion on my poetical works hath molested me; but you afford me more than compensation in supposing me acutely sensible of injustice done to Wordsworth. If we must converse on these topics, we will converse on him. What man ever existed who spent a more inoffensive life, or adorned it with nobler studies ? Parson. None; and they who attack him with virulence are men of as little morality as reflection. I have demonstrated that one of them, he who wrote the Pursuits of Literature, could not construe a Greek sentence or scan a verse; and I have fallen on the very Index from which he drew out his forlorn hope on the parade. This is incomparably the most impudent fellow I have met with in the course of my reading, which has lain, you know, in a province where impudence is no rarity. I am sorry to say that we critics who write for the learned, have sometimes set a bad example to our younger brothers, the critics who write for the public: but if they were considerate and prudent, they would find out that a deficiency in weight and authority might in some measure be compensated by deference and decorum. Not to mention the refuse of the literary world, the sweeping of booksellers’ shops, the dust thrown up by them in a corner to blow by pinches on new publications; not totread upon or disturb this filth, the greatest of our critics now living are only great comparativ…
