his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should Famine, Sword and Fire
Crouch for employment.

Well, this passage Burke, assuming his correspondent to be familiar with
it, boldly claps into prose and inserts into a long diatribe against Pitt
for having tamely submitted to the rebuffs of the French Directory. Thus
it becomes:--

On that day it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars: that
he would bid to be brought forth from their hideous Kennel (where his
scrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs
of War, whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance
that feeds them; that he would let them loose in Famine, Plagues and
Death, upon a guilty race to whose frame and to all whose habit, Order,
Peace, Religion and Virtue, are alien and abhorrent.

Now Shakespeare is but apologising for the shortcomings of his'
play-house, whereas Burke is denouncing his country's shame and
prophesying disaster to Europe. Yet do you not feel with me that while
Shakespeare, using great words on the lowlier subject, contrives to make
them appropriate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, the same or
similar words have become tumid, turgid?

Why? I am sure that the difference lies not in the two men: nor is it all
the secret, or even half the secret, that Burke is mixing up the spoken
with the written word, using the one while pretending to use the other.
That has carried us some way; but now let us take an important step
farther. The root of the matter lies in certain essential differences
between verse and prose. We will keep, if you please, to our rough
practical definitions. Literature--the written word--is a permanent
record of memorable speech; a record, at any rate, intended to be
permanent. We set a thing down in ink--we print it in a book--because we
feel it to be memorable, to be worth preserving. But to set this
memorable speech down we must choose one of two forms, verse or prose;
and I define verse to be a record in metre and rhythm, prose to be a
record which, dispensing with metre (abhorring it indeed), uses rhythm
laxly, preferring it to be various and unconstrained, so always that it
convey a certain pleasure to the ear.

You observe that I avoid the term Poetry, over which the critics have
waged, and still are waging, a war that promises to be endless. Is Walt
Whitman a poet? Is the Song of Songs (which is not Solomon's)--is the
Book of Job--ar