ature and religion smiled on the wark,
and have stamped it with immortality.

_North._ Samuel was seventy years old when he wrote the _Lives of the
Poets_.

_Shepherd._ What a fine old buck! No unlike yoursel'.

_North._ Would it were so! He had his prejudicies, and his partialities,
and his bigotries, and his blindnesses,--but on the same fruit-tree you
see shrivelled pears or apples on the same branch with jargonelles or
golden pippins worthy of paradise. Which would ye show to the
Horticultural Society as a fair specimen of the tree?

_Shepherd._ Good, kit, good--philosophically picturesque. (_Mimicking
the old man's voice and manner._)

_North._ Show me the critique that beats his on Pope, and on Dryden--
nay, even on Milton; and hang me if you may not read his essay on
Shakespeare even after having read Charles Lamb, or heard Coleridge,
with increased admiration of the powers of all three, and of their
insight, through different avenues, and as it might seem almost with
different bodily and mental organs, into Shakespeare's "old exhausted,"
and his "new imagined worlds." He was a critic and a moralist who would
have been wholly wise, had he not been partly--constitutionally insane.
For there is blood in the brain, James--even in the organ--the vital
principle of all our "eagle-winged raptures"; and there was a taint of
the black drop of melancholy in his.

_Shepherd._ Wheesht--wheesht--let us keep aff that subject. All men ever
I knew are mad; and but for that law o' natur, never, never, in this
warld had there been a _Noctes Ambrosianae_.

CRUMBS FROM THE "NOCTES"

MISS MITFORD

_North._ Miss Mitford has not in my opinion either the pathos or humour
of Washington Irving; but she excels him in vigorous conception of
character, and in the truth of her pictures of English life and manners.
Her writings breathe a sound, pure, and healthy morality, and are
pervaded by a genuine rural spirit--the spirit of merry England. Every
line bespeaks the lady.

_Shepherd._ I admire Miss Mitford just excessively. I dinna wunner at
her being able to write sae weel as she does about drawing-rooms wi'
sofas and settees, and about the fine folk in them seeing themsels in
lookin-glasses frae tap to tae; but what puzzles the like o' me, is her
pictures o' poachers, and tinklers, and pottery-trampers, and ither
neerdoweels, and o' huts and hovels without riggin' by the wayside, and
the cottages o' honest puir men, and