n for breach of promise, then there is not a
syllable in the poem with which he crowns his crime that is not
alive with meaning. On any other supposition to the general reader
it is unintelligible.

We cannot be too guarded in the interpretations we put upon the
words of great poets. Take the young lady who never loved the dear
gazelle--and I don't believe she did; we are apt to think that Moore
intended us to see in this creation of his fancy a sweet, amiable,
but most unfortunate young woman, whereas all he has told us about
her points to an exactly opposite conclusion. In reality, he wished
us to see a young lady who had been a habitual complainer from her
earliest childhood; whose plants had always died as soon as she
bought them, while those belonging to her neighbours had flourished.
The inference is obvious, nor can we reasonably doubt that Moore
intended us to draw it; if her plants were the very first to fade
away, she was evidently the very first to neglect or otherwise
maltreat them. She did not give them enough water, or left the door
of her fern-case open when she was cooking her dinner at the gas
stove, or kept them too near the paraffin oil, or other like folly;
and as for her temper, see what the gazelles did; as long as they
did not know her "well," they could just manage to exist, but when
they got to understand her real character, one after another felt
that death was the only course open to it, and accordingly died
rather than live with such a mistress. True, the young lady herself
said the gazelles loved her; but disagreeable people are apt to
think themselves amiable, and in view of the course invariably taken
by the gazelles themselves anyone accustomed to weigh evidence will
hold that she was probably mistaken.

I must, however, return to Frost's Lives of Eminent Christians. I
will leave none of the ambiguity about my words in which Moore and
Wordsworth seem to have delighted. I am very sorry the book is
gone, and know not where to turn for its successor. Till I have
found a substitute I can write no more, and I do not know how to
find even a tolerable one. I should try a volume of Migne's
Complete Course of Patrology, but I do not like books in more than
one volume, for the volumes vary in thickness, and one never can
remember which one took; the four volumes, however, of Bede in
Giles's Anglican Fathers are not open to this objection, and I have
reserved them for favourable consider