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COLLINS
of his generation into all the labours of their lives. And the memory of his name and the impression of his genius can only pass away with all relics and all records of lyric poetry in England.
(This brief notice was published in the third volume of Mr. Ward's Selections from the English Poets, side by side with the admirable study in which Mr. Matthew Arnold has so powerfully advocated the claim of Gray to a higher place among these poets than he is prepared to concede to Collins. 'Something of the like merit' is all that the most distinguished of living Wordsworthians will allow him: but I am fain to believe that the verdict of Wordsworth himself would have been given on the opposite side.)
