[32] For example:—
“And in the arber was a tre
A fairer in the world might none be,”
should certainly read,
“None fairer in the world might be.”
[33] The to is, we need not say, an addition of Mr. Hazlitt’s. What faith can we put in the text of a man who so often copies even his quotations inaccurately?
[34] This was Thomas Warton’s opinion.
[35] Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died.
[36] In his Tractate on Education.
[37] Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony were all musicians.
[38] Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray’s tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest lines,