f the heavy commodity
_time_; a raw material, which as they seldom work up at home, they are
always willing to truck against the time of their more domestic
acquaintance. Now as these last _have_ always something to do, it is an
unfair traffic; "all the reciprocity is on one side," to borrow the
expression of an illustrious statesman; and the barter is as
disadvantageous to the sober home-trader, as that of the honest negroes,
who exchange their gold-dust and ivory for the beads and bits of glass
of the wily English.

These nightly irruptions, though sometimes inconvenient to my friends,
were of use to me, as they enabled me to see and judge more of the gay
world than I could have done without going in search of it; a risk which
I thought bore no proportion to the gain. It was like learning the
language of the enemy's country at home.

One evening, when we were sitting happily alone in the library, Lady
Belfield, working at her embroidery, cheerfully joining in our little
discussions, and comparing our peaceful pleasures with those pursued by
the occupiers of the countless carriages which were tearing up the
"wheel-worn streets," or jostling each other at the door of the next
house, where a grand assembly was collecting its myriads--Sir John asked
what should be the evening book. Then rising, he took down from the
shelf Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination.

"Is it," said he, as soon as he sat down, "the rage for novelty, or a
real degeneracy of taste, that we now so seldom hear of a poet, who,
when I was a boy, was the admiration of every man who had a relish for
true genius? I can not defend his principles, since in a work, of which
_Man_ is professedly the object, he has overlooked his _immortality_: a
subject which one wonders did not force itself upon him, as so congenial
to the sublimity of his genius, whatever his religious views might have
been. But to speak of him only as a poet; a work which abounds in a
richer profusion of images, and a more variegated luxuriance of
expression than the Pleasures of Imagination, can not easily be found.
The flimsy metre of our day seems to add fresh value to his sinewy
verse. We have no happier master of poetic numbers; none who better knew

To build the lofty rhyme.

The condensed vigor, so indispensable to blank verse, the skillful
variation of the pause, the masterly structure of the period, and all
the occult mysteries of the art, can, perhaps, be best learned from