Now that I knew that I was talking to one of the veterans of the gentle craft, as there was no time to waste in idle ceremony, I asked him abruptly what he thought of Shelley as a poet.
'Nothing,' he replied as abruptly.
Seeing my surprise, he added, 'A poet who has not produced a good poem before he is twenty-five we may conclude cannot and never will do so.' 'The "Cenci"!' I said eagerly.
'Won't do,' he replied, shaking his head, as he got into the carriage: a rough-coated Scotch terrier followed him.
'This hairy fellow is our flea-trap,' he shouted out as they started off.
When I recovered from the shock of having heard the harsh sentence passed by an elder bard on a younger brother of the Muses, I exclaimed, 'After all, poets are but earth.

It is the old story,--envy--Cain and Abel.

Professions, sects, and communities in general, right or wrong, hold together, men of the pen excepted; if one of their guild is worsted in the battle, they do as the rooks do by their inky brothers--fly from him, cawing and screaming; if they don't fire the shot, they sound the bugle to charge.' I did not then know that the full-fledged author never reads the writings of his contemporaries, except to cut them up in a review, that being a work of love.

In after years, Shelley being dead, Wordsworth confessed this fact; he was then induced to read some of Shelley's poems, and admitted that Shelley was the greatest master of harmonious verse in our modern literature.

(Pp.