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fore "one of the moods of my own mind." But Mr Wordsworth should reflect, that the life and character of Burns had, long before Dr Currie's edition, been the theme of universal discussion; that he had lived in the eye of the world; that innumerable anecdotes of his conversation, habits, propensities, and domestic economy, were floating through society; that thousands existed who knew him and the general tenor of his life; and that therefore, had his biographer preserved that strict silence regarding his personal character which Mr Wordsworth recommends, he would thereby have seemed to sanction the world's belief in all the false or exaggerated stories in circulation about that extraordinary man,—to have shrunk from the relation of facts which he could not justify, and to have drawn a veil over enormities which he could not but condemn.
But let us turn from this part of the Letter, which we are confident every liberal mind must peruse with disgust and indignation, to the purely absurd and ludicrous matter contained in the concluding ten pages. Much has been written, and well written, on the genius of Burns; but all other critics must hide their diminished heads on the advance of Mr Wordsworth. He has somewhere told us, that he is a water-drinker; and we believe him, for surely there never was so strange and awkward an eulogist of intoxication.
"His brother can set me right if I am mistaken, when I express a belief that, at the time when he wrote his story of 'Death and Dr Hornbook,' he had very rarely been intoxicated, or perhaps even much exhilarated by liquor. Yet how happily does he lead his reader into that tract of sensations! and with what lively humour does he describe the disorder of his senses and the confusion of his understanding, put to test by a deliberate attempt to count the horns of the moon!
He couldna tell.'
"Behold a sudden apparition that disperses this disorder, and in a moment chills him into possession of himself! Coming upon no more important mission than the grisly phantom was charged with, what mode of introduction could have been more efficient or appropriate?"
Really Mr Wordsworth's poetry is less absurd than his criticism.
We had hoped, after all, to part with Mr Wordsworth in tolerably good humour, and with a smile on our faces; but what follows is too deplorable to be laughed at; and if he will make a fool of himself, he cannot well blame us for recording his folly. The secret cause of all his intemperate zeal in the needless vindication of Burns now betrays itself; and, as if maddened by a sudden sense of intolerable wrong, he falls foul of the Editor of the Edinburgh Review with a violence that must discompose the nervous system of that learned and ingenious person. It seems that Mr Peterkin, in his very heavy and dry Essay, had made several quotations from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. The last of these articles is far more severe on Burns' failings than the first. But Mr Wordsworth passes the Quarterly Review quietly over; and, with the voice and countenance of a maniac, fixes his teeth in the blue cover of the Edinburgh. He growls over it—shakes it violently to and fro—and at last, wearied out with vain efforts at mastication, leaves it covered over with the drivelling slaver of his impotent rage.
But what will be thought of Mr Wordsworth, when he tells us that he has never read the offensive criticism in the Edinburgh Review! He has only seen the garbled extract of Mr Peterkin. What right, then, has he to talk big of injustice done to the dead, when he is himself so deplorably deficient in justice to the living? But Mr Wordsworth must not be allowed to escape that castigation which his unparalleled insolence deserves. The world is not to be gulled by his hypocritical zeal in the defence of injured merit. It is not Robert Burns for whom he feels,—it is William Wordsworth. All the while that he is exclaiming against the Reviewer's injustice to Burns, he writhes under the lash which that consummate satirist has inflicted upon himself, and exhibits a back yet sore with the wounds which have been in vain kept open, and which his restless and irritable vanity will never allow to close.
We shall not disgrace our pages with any portion of the low and vulgar abuse which the enraged poet heaps upon the Editor of the Edinburgh Review. It is Mr Wordsworth's serious opinion, that that gentleman is a person of the very weakest intellects—that his malignity is neutralized