Convention is an earnest and eloquent production. It contains long paragraphs of fine writing, and reminds us, at almost every page, of some of the prose works of Milton, having most of their faults, and a few of their beauties. As a political treatise on a great crisis, it must be regarded as a failure; and we know, that despite of the interest of the subject, it met with but a cold reception.[1]
It was at this time also that he was toiling at "The Excursion," which was not, however, published until the year 1814. We will not here discuss its merits. Most of our readers are acquainted with the celebrated opening comment of the Northern Reviewer. "This will never do!" Undismayed by the severity of the censure of the critic, Wordsworth the following year gave to the world "The White Doe of Rylstone;" and Jeffrey commenced his notice of the poem with a longer but more censorious dictum. "This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume; and though it was scarcely to be expected, we confess, that Mr. Wordsworth, with all his ambition, should so soon have attained to that distinction, the wonder may perhaps be diminished when we state, that it seems to us to consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry."
- ↑ We certainly cannot agree with the Reverend Biographer that "if Mr. Wordsworth had never written a single verse, this Essay alone would be sufficient to place him in the highest rank of English Poets;" and still less would it give him a high rank among English Prose writers. In an article in "Fraser's Magazine," Aug. 1850, the pamphlet is lauded to the skies, and compared to Demosthenes, Milton, and Burke. The writer in the "Quarterly" takes a different view. His opinion is, that "the phraseology of his sentences is heavy and frigid; the construction involved; and though he grudges not space, the loose, and circumlocutory diction constantly leaves his meaning dark. But what was least to be expected, there is a poverty of thought even upon subjects which he thoroughly understood."
