Gents Mag 1828 part 1 p.399

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	Gentleman's Magazine 1828 part 1 p.399
William Wordsworth   Speculations on Literary Pleasures
	Speculations on Literary Pleasures ... ... Wordsworth has his admirers, and he doubtless has also his beauties; but these beauties are so frequently solitary and isolated, and so thinly scattered through a series of verbose and languid dissertations, which have not much of either grace or dignity to recommend them, that their effect is lost. When we read Wordsworth, indeed, we are not unfrequently reminded that there was a person named Dr. Darwin, who, a few years before him, wrote poetry in a very mediocritous and questionable style of excellence; and that the Della Crusca school of sentiment, which certainly favours Mr. Wordsworth with an occasional archetype, is by no means a safe model for a poet who wishes to reach posterity. If it is admitted that one of the chief ends of a poet, if he is to pretend to classical honours, should be at once the general improvement of society, and the establishment of a standard of taste among his countrymen, we cannot afford to lavish any high approbation on him who has not eminently accomplished either of these ends, unless his beauties of another kind are of a very high redeeming order. But the warmest encomiasts of Wordsworth will, it is probable, admit that he not unfrequently sinks to puerilities below the standard here mentioned; and on the other hand, often rises to a sublimated sort of cloudiness, ill according with that positive kind of beauty recognized in our best classical writers. Wordsworth may in some respects be termed the Sterne of poetry. He has, like his predecessor, endeavoured to extract sentiment where nobody else ever dreamt of looking for it, and has often exalted trifles into a consequence which nature never intended them to
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