of unreality.

"The poet," as the word implies, is the maker or the creator; and
however little of the higher attributes of what the world esteems as
poetry the character would seem to possess, he who invents a
personage, the conformity of whose traits to the rule of life is
acknowledged for its truth, he, I say, is a poet. Thus, there is
poetry in Sancho Panza, Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty, and a hundred other
similar impersonations; and why not in Bernard Cavanagh?

Look for a moment at the effects of your system. The Caraccis, we are
told, spent their boyish years drawing rude figures with chalk on the
doors and even the walls of the palaces of Rome: here the first germs
of their early talent displayed themselves; and in those bold
conceptions of youthful genius were seen the first dawnings of a power
that gave glory to the age they lived in. Had Sir Peter Laurie been
their cotemporary, had 964 been loose in those days, they would have
been treated with a trip to the mill, and their taste for design
cultivated by the low diet of a penitentiary. You know not what
budding genius you have nipped with this abominable system: you think
not of the early indications of mind and intellect you may be
consigning to prison: or is it after all, that the matter-of-fact
spirit of the age has sapped the very vitals of our law-code, and that
in your utilitarian zeal you have doomed to death all that bears the
stamp of imagination? if this be indeed your object, have a good
heart, encourage 964, and you'll not leave a novelist in the land.

Good reader, I ask your pardon for all this honest indignation; I know
it is in vain: I cannot reform our jurisprudence; and our laws, like
the Belgian revolution, must be regarded "_comme un fait accompli_;"
in other words, what can't be cured must be endured. Let us leave then
our friend the Pole to perform his penance; let us say adieu to
Barney, who is at this moment occupying a suite of apartments in the
Penitentiary, and let us turn to the reverse of the medal, I mean to
those who would wile us away by false promises and flattering speeches
to entertain such views of life as are not only impossible but
inconsistent, thus rendering our path here devoid of interest and of
pleasure, while compared with the extravagant creations of their own
erring fancies. Yes, princes may be trusted, but put not your faith in
periodicals. Let no pictorial representations of Alpine scenery, under
the auspices