11 JULY 1885, Page 3

The annual meeting of the Wordsworth Society was held at

Lord Houghton's own house, in Rutland Gardens, on Wednes- day, and addressed at some length by Lord Houghton himself. Though he denied to Wordsworth the name of a poet of passion, and treated him as a poet of sentiment only, he spoke of the" Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" as the greatest poem in the English language. Lord Houghton confided to the society that in persuading the Master of Trinity (then Wordsworth's brother) to grant to him and two friends the requisite exeat when they went on their memorable mission to persuade the University of Oxford that Shelley was a greater poet than Byron, he gained his point partly by ignoring altogether the name of Shelley, and representing to the old Master of Trinity that the purpose of their evangel was to dethrone Byron's immoral poetry from its supremacy, jesuitically allowing the worthy man to imagine that it would be Wordsworth, and not Shelley, on whose behalf the youthful missionaries were to plead. This ingenuous confession was received by the assembled Words- worthians in excellent part, though the confession did imply, what, indeed, we imagine Lord Houghton to have intimated throughout, that he places Shelley, on the whole, above Words- worth. With that estimate we cannot agree. Both are among the immortals ; but to our mind the passion of Wordsworth is a passion of a higher order, as well as of a larger volume, than the passion of Shelley. However, the address was one of considerable interest. Lord Houghton, as he frankly owned, enjoyed talking over the poets of his youth with his literary friends, and he imparted that sense of enjoyment to his audience,