in prose. She is quick to revere genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it. Genius, as Hazlitt scornfully remarks, "says such things," and the average woman distrusts "such things," and wonders why the poet will not learn to talk and behave like ordinary people. It hardly needed the crusty shrewdness of Christopher North to point out to us the arrant ill-success with which the Muse has always gone a-wooing. "Making love and making love-verses," he explains, "are two of the most different things in the world, and I doubt if both accomplishments were ever found highly united in the same gifted individual. Inspiration is of little avail either to gods or men in the most interesting affairs of life, those of the earth. The pretty maid who seems to listen kindly
'Kisses the cup, and passes it to the rest,'
and next morning, perhaps, is off before breakfast in a chaise-and-four to Gretna Green, with an aid-de-camp of Wellington, as destitute of imagination as his master." It is the cheerful equanimity with which the older poets anticipated and endured some such finale as
