l mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.'

Coleridge added a note to his beautiful poem, 'The Nightingale,' lest he
should be supposed capable of speaking with levity of a single line in
Milton. The note was hardly necessary, but one loves the spirit that
prompted him to make it. Sainte-Beuve remarks: 'Parler des poetes est
toujours une chose bien delicate, et surtout quand on l'a ete un peu soi-
meme.' But though it does not matter what the little poets do, great
ones should never pass one another without a royal salute.

POPE.

_A Lecture delivered at Birmingham before the Midland Institute_.

The eighteenth century has been well abused by the nineteenth. So far as
I can gather, it is the settled practice of every century to speak evil
of her immediate predecessor, and I have small doubt that, had we gone
groping about in the tenth century, we should yet have been found hinting
that the ninth was darker than she had any need to be.

But our tone of speaking about the last century has lately undergone an
alteration. The fact is, we are drawing near our own latter end. The
Head Master of Harrow lately thrilled an audience by informing them that
he had, that very day, entered an existing _bona fide_ boy upon the
school books, whose education, however, would not begin till the
twentieth century. As a parent was overheard to observe, 'An
illustration of that sort comes home to one.' The older we grow the less
confident we become, the readier to believe that our judgments are
probably wrong, and liable, and even likely, to be reversed; the better
disposed to live and let live. The child, as Mr. Browning has somewhere
elaborated, cries for the moon and beats its nurse, but the old man sips
his gruel with avidity and thanks Heaven if nobody beats him. And so we
have left off beating the eighteenth century. It was not so, however, in
our lusty prime. Carlyle, historian though he was of Frederick the Great
and the French Revolution, revenged himself for the trouble it gave him
by loading it with all vile epithets. If it had been a cock or a cook he
could not have called it harder names. It was century spendthrift,
fraudulent, bankrupt, a swindler century, which did but one true action,
'namely, to blow its brains out in that grand universal suicide named
French Revolution.'

The leaders of the neo-Catholic movement very properly shudder