I dare say, if a very bright, particular star should arise, we would honour him; but we have no bright particular star; and, thus, we learn to read poetry without reflection.

Forty years ago, people used to talk over the last production of the muse, and canvas its merits in coffee-rooms all over the town; now, we only dash through it, as we would take up the last new novel, or the evening paper, thinking no more about it!" "When I was younger," said Miss Spight--she didn't say when she was "young," mark you--"no young gentlewoman's education would have been thought complete without a course of the best poets, such as Milton's _Paradise Lost_." "Which nine out of ten of the people who speak about it now, never read," said I--and, Miss Spight did not reply.
"What queer people poets are, generally speaking," said Mr Mawley.
"Do you think so ?" said I.
"Yes, I do," he replied.

"I would divide poets into three great classes, which I would call respectively the enthusiastic school, the water-cart school, and the horse-going-round-in-the-mill school." "O-oh, Mr Mawley!" exclaimed Bessie Dasher, in the unmeaning manner common to young ladies, in lieu of saying anything, when they have got nothing to say: the exclamation expressing either astonishment, horror, alarm, or rebuke, as the case may require.
"Instance, instance! Name, name!" said I, keeping the curate up to the mark.
"Well, I will give you Horner, and Dante, Goethe, Byron, and, perhaps, Tennyson, from which to take your choice amongst those whom I call the enthusiastic school; Mrs Hemans, and others of her tearful race, in the second; and, in the third order, the majority of those who have spoilt good ink and paper, from Dryden down to Martin F Tupper." "What, no exceptions; not even my favourite Longfellow ?" asked Min.
"No," said Mr Mawley, "not one--although Longfellow belongs more by rights to the water-cart line.

The fact is," continued he, fairly started on his hobby, "that Pegasus, the charger of Mount Parnassus, is a most eccentric animal, who can be made to metamorphose himself so completely according to the skill and ability or weakness of his rider, that even Apollo would not recognise him sometimes! When backed by an intrepid spirit, like the grand heroic poets, Pegasus is the stately war-horse eager for the fray, and sniffing the battle from afar; or else, controlled by the nervous reins of genius like that of Shelley and Coleridge, he appears as the high-mettled racer, pure-blooded and finely-trained, who may win some great race, but is unfit for any ordinary work; or, again, when ridden by a Wordsworth, he plods along wearily, with lack-lustre eyes, dragging a heavy load, such as _The Excursion_, behind him!" What the curate might have said further was lost to his hearers.

Just at this moment, on turning a bend of the river, the pretty little low- arched bridge that spans it in front of Richmond came in sight; seeing which, the children raised such a shout of joy in the bows of the gondola, that our conversation shunted into a fresh channel, while our teamster, urging his horse by a multitude of "gee wo's," into a brisk trot, tightened our tow-rope and led us up in fine style to our goal.
A short distance from the landing-place under the bridge, we found the detachments that had gone by road, awaiting us.