foreshortened. But our ancestors had none of that sensitive shrinking from comparisons which is so characteristic of our timid and thin-skinned generation. They did not edge off from the immortals, afraid to breathe their names lest it be held lèse-majesté; they used them as the common currency of criticism. Why should not Mr. Hayley have challenged a contrast with Dante and Ariosto, when Miss Seward assured her little world—which was also Mr. Hayley's world—that he had the "wit and ease" of Prior, a "more varied versification" than Pope, and "the fire and the invention of Dryden, without any of Dryden's absurdity"? Why should he have questioned her judgment, when she wrote to him that Cowper's "Task" would "please and instruct the race of common readers," who could not rise to the beauties of Akenside, or Mason, or Milton, or of his (Mr. Hayley's) "exquisite 'Triumphs of Temper'"? There was a time, indeed, when she sorrowed lest his "inventive, classical, and elegant muse" should be "deplorably infected" by the growing influence of Wordsworth; but, that peril past, he rose
