Mr. G.—Wordsworth used occasionally to dine with me when I lived in the Albany. A most agreeable man. I always found him amiable, polite, and sympathetic. Only once did he jar upon me, when he spoke slightingly of Tennyson's first performance.
J. M.—But he was not so wrong as he would be now. Tennyson's Juvenilia are terribly artificial.
Mr. G.—Yes, perhaps. Tennyson has himself withdrawn some of them. I remember W., when he dined with me, used on leaving to change his silk stockings in the anteroom and put on grey worsted.
J. M.—I once said to M. Arnold that I'd rather have been Wordsworth than anybody [not exactly a modest ambition]; and Arnold, who knew him well in the Grasmere country, said, “Oh no, you would not; you would wish you were dining with me at the Athenæum. He was too much of the peasant for you.”
Mr. G.—No, I never felt that; I always thought him a polite and an amiable man.
Mentioned Macaulay's strange judgment in a note in the History, that Dryden's famous lines,
“... Fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.
To-morrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blest