than justly, some years before the publication of these Poems:—
" Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and theyy remained from that time neglected; now after their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, of London, a philosophic critic, with a coequal vigour of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon's. . . . The admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to say on their proper grounds."—Representative Men: "Swedenborg, or the Mystic."
"Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier, and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a native vigour, with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armoury of the invincible knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality. If his mind does not rest in immovable biases, perhaps the orbit is larger, and the return is not yet: but a master should inspire a confidence that he will adhere to his convictions, and give his present studies always the same high place."—English Traits: chap. xiv. "Literature."
Now, most of my readers have probably seen and heard, in common with myself, a bad deal about "Inspirational Discourses," and many may have heard one or more of such effusions (I have heard but one, from a woman who seemed a cleverish actress); and many also have probably seen scraps and screeds of rhyme and the blankest of blank verse, claiming to be improvisations dictated by eminent spirits, Byron, Poe, Cowper, Shelley, and so forth. One has glanced at such things now and then as they happened to come in his way, but never as expecting
