ho is a worthy,
affectionate old soul, will give you a nudge to bespeak your attention
without disturbing the abstracted one, and whisper with a shake of the
head, that John's imagination is at some extraordinary work or other, you
may take her word for it. Hereupon John looks more fiercely intent upon
vacancy than before, and suddenly snatching a pencil from his pocket,
puts down three words, and a cross on the back of a card, sighs deeply,
paces once or twice across the room, inflicts a most unmerciful slap upon
his head, and walks moodily up to his dormitory.

The poetical young gentleman is apt to acquire peculiar notions of things
too, which plain ordinary people, unblessed with a poetical obliquity of
vision, would suppose to be rather distorted. For instance, when the
sickening murder and mangling of a wretched woman was affording delicious
food wherewithal to gorge the insatiable curiosity of the public, our
friend the poetical young gentleman was in ecstasies--not of disgust, but
admiration. 'Heavens!' cried the poetical young gentleman, 'how grand;
how great!' We ventured deferentially to inquire upon whom these
epithets were bestowed: our humble thoughts oscillating between the
police officer who found the criminal, and the lock-keeper who found the
head. 'Upon whom!' exclaimed the poetical young gentleman in a frenzy of
poetry, 'Upon whom should they be bestowed but upon the murderer!'--and
thereupon it came out, in a fine torrent of eloquence, that the murderer
was a great spirit, a bold creature full of daring and nerve, a man of
dauntless heart and determined courage, and withal a great casuist and
able reasoner, as was fully demonstrated in his philosophical colloquies
with the great and noble of the land. We held our peace, and meekly
signified our indisposition to controvert these opinions--firstly,
because we were no match at quotation for the poetical young gentleman;
and secondly, because we felt it would be of little use our entering into
any disputation, if we were: being perfectly convinced that the
respectable and immoral hero in question is not the first and will not be
the last hanged gentleman upon whom false sympathy or diseased curiosity
will be plentifully expended.

This was a stern mystic flight of the poetical young gentleman. In his
milder and softer moments he occasionally lays down his neckcloth, and
pens stanzas, which sometimes find their way into a Lady's Magazine, or
the