its of Lord Byron, as he had hitherto done
in every instance! However, the affair was too ludicrous to be at once
altogether dropped; and, so long as the prudish publication was in
existence, it enjoyed the _sobriquet_ of "My Grandmother's Review."

By the way, there is another hoax connected with this poem. One day
an old gentleman gravely inquired of a printseller for a portrait of
"Admiral Noah"--to illustrate _Don Juan_!

* * * * *

WALPOLE'S WAY TO WIN THEM.

Sir Robert Walpole, in one of his letters, thus describes the relations
of a skilful Minister with an accommodating Parliament--the description,
it may be said, having, by lapse of time, acquired the merit of general
inapplicability to the present state of things:--"My dear friend, there
is scarcely a member whose purse I do not know to a sixpence, and whose
very soul almost I could not purchase at the offer. The reason former
Ministers have been deceived in this matter is evident--they never
considered the temper of the people they had to deal with. I have known
a minister so weak as to offer an avaricious old rascal a star and
garter, and attempt to bribe a young rogue, who set no value upon money,
with a lucrative employment. I pursue methods as opposite as the poles,
and therefore my administration has been attended with a different
effect." "Patriots," elsewhere says Walpole, "spring up like mushrooms.
I could raise fifty of them within four-and-twenty hours. I have raised
many of them in one night. It is but refusing to gratify an unreasonable
or insolent demand, and _up starts a patriot_."

* * * * *

DR. JOHNSON'S CRITICISMS.

Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a legislator.
He never examined foundations where a point was already ruled. His whole
code of criticism rested on pure assumption, for which he sometimes gave
a precedent or authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason
drawn from the nature of things. He judged of all works of the imagination
by the standard established among his own contemporaries. Though he
allowed Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to have
thought the AEneid to have been a greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed, he
well might have thought so; for he preferred Pope's _Iliad_ to Homer's.
He pronounced that after Hoole's translation of _Tasso_, Fairfax's would
hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in