t that I had not put an obol into his hand, lest he should be
presented with a return-ticket. What did he say, and what did he not
say? He called my daughter "Miss," and said he should like music very
well but for the noise of it; and as to his ideas of poetry, that you
speak of, he treated it with the utmost contempt, and as a "very
round-about-way of getting to matter of fact." What else could I have
expected of him?--with his tight-drawn skin over his distended cheeks,
from which his nose scarcely protruded, as defying a pinch, with a
forehead like Caliban's, as villanously low, with his close-cut hair
sticking to it, and his little chin retiring, lest a magnanimous thought
should for a moment rest upon it. Such was never the image that
Cassandra had in her mind's eye when she cried, "O, Apollo--O, Apollo!"
And this was your friend, forsooth, with his novel ideas upon poetry!
Yet this vulgar piece of human mechanism is not without a little cunning
shrewdness, characteristically marked in his little pig-eye; and I must
tell you one piece of criticism of his, and an emendation, not unworthy
the great Bentley himself. Yet I know not why I tell you, for you know
it well already, I suspect; for he told me he had been talking with you
about a letter which you had published, and told him was written by me,
and which he had read while waiting in your library till you could see
him. He said he thought a little common sense, observation, and plain
matter of fact, would often either throw light upon or amend many
obscure passages of poets; for that even those of most name either made
egregious blunders, or they were made for them. I could not deny that
truth, Eusebius, and yet he wasn't a man to grant any thing to, if you
could help it; but I saw there was something rich to come, so I
encouraged him; and this remark of his, Eusebius, reminded me of a
misery occasioned in the mind of a very sensitive and reverend poet, who
preached weekly to a very particular congregation, by the printer's
devil mistaking an erasure for a hyphen, which gave to his sonnet a most
improper expression. It made him miserable then, and will ever give him
a twinge lest he should have suffered in reputation. He has so much
reason to be happy now, that to remind him of it, should he happen to
read this, is only to make his happiness the greater, by somewhat
reducing its quality; as the very atmosphere must be tempered for man's
use and health, by somewhat