Before speaking of Scott as a novelist it should be said that he was the most copious, various, and readable of the critics and general writers of his time. His great edition of Dryden, now reinforced by the notes of Mr. Saintsbury, still holds its ground, in despite of the contempt of Leigh Hunt; and his "Life of Swift" is still the most valuable, for the judgment of so sane and generous a mind on the mystery of Swift's character and career. Scott's many essays, collected from periodicals, mainly from "The Quarterly Review," which he practically founded, are treasures of information and anecdote. His criticism for example in the "Lives of the Novelists" errs most in the direction of generosity. His "Tales of a Grandfather," written for his little grandson, John Lockhart, who died in childhood, combines delightful versions of historic legends of early times with the most impartial treatment of such difficult and disputable periods as the Reformation and the age of the Covenant. Scott had strong sentimental leanings towards Mary Stuart, the Cavaliers, and the Jacobites, but, in writing history for the young, he deliberately corrected his bias. A life of Mary Stuart he refused to write, because his reason was at variance with his feelings. His "Napoleon" was a piece of task-work, executed with cruel rapidity, and, of course, he had not access to many sources of information now open. Of course, too, like any man who had lived through the Napoleonic wars, he was a partisan, in his case of his country's party. But he did not carry political partisanship into literature; he had no part (despite ignorant assertions) in the attacks on "the Cockney School"; he tried to tempt Charles Lamb to visit him at Abbotsford; and he seized an opportunity of applauding Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" because he believed it to be by Shelley.
William Wordsworth.
The contrast between the friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, was that which poets observe between the South and the North. The child of the soft enervating air of Devonshire, Coleridge, according to his own early diagnosis already quoted, had every other gift, mental and moral, but lacked energy and resolution, his hand was "graspless". Wordsworth, on the contrary (born at Cockermouth, 7 April, 1770) was a child of the North and of the Border, and a grandchild of Dorothy, born Crackanthorp, a member of a family which, in the old Border laws, is named among the Watchers of the Fords, against the Scottish raiders. To a genius as great if not as diversified as Coleridge's, Wordsworth united an iron will to be a poet and, as he said, "a teacher,". With the keenest love of universal nature from the mountains and the storms to "the meanest flower that blows," he combined that sense of unity with Nature, and with "something still more deeply interfused," which Coleridge speaks of in a poem (1795) composed before he and Wordsworth became intimate. Says Coleridge
O the one life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a soundlike power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.
Coleridge adds that when he lies at midday on the side of a hill, his fancies traverse his brain
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject lute,
namely an Æolian harp placed in the open window.
Wordsworth, to the same emotions as of a conscious Æolian harp vibrating to the universe, added an invincible resolve to extract the moral out of every vibration, and to register it in verse. In this task he knew no slackness, he was daily observing, daily composing, consequently the mass of his poetry is very great, and very unequally inspired, since "it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill" of the poet, while Wordsworth was busy at all moments.
After a boyhood happily passed, when he was out of school, in angling, skating, boating, and setting springes for woodcock, Wordsworth went to St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1787, taking his bachelor's degree in 1791. He was an orphan; his father, a solicitor, had been far from prosperous, and it was perhaps to the generosity of his uncle that he owed the advantage of being allowed to "mew his mighty youth" in what the world calls idleness. He had the same intense consciousness of and reverence for his own genius as Milton and Tennyson possessed: he would be a poet and nothing but a poet, for the position of Stamp Distributor which he later enjoyed was a sinecure. Concerning all his poetic childhood and boyhood, and residence in France (from the end of 1791 to the opening of 1793),