and so intensely painful,
that the owner of the dog with the begging-tray thus spoke, that Kenelm
felt, through sympathy, as if he himself were torn asunder by the wrench
of life from soul. But then Kenelm was a mortal so eccentric that, if
a single acute suffering endured by a fellow mortal could be brought
before the evidence of his senses, I doubt whether he would not have
suffered as much as that fellow-mortal. So that, though if there were a
thing in the world which Kenelm Chillingly would care not to do, it was
verse-making, his mind involuntarily hastened to the arguments by which
he could best mitigate the pang of the verse-maker.

Quoth he: "According to my very scanty reading, you share the love
of verse-making with men the most illustrious in careers which have
achieved the goal of fame. It must, then, be a very noble love:
Augustus, Pollio, Varius, Maecenas,--the greatest statesmen of their
day,--they were verse-makers. Cardinal Richelieu was a verse-maker;
Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, Fox, Burke, Sheridan, Warren
Hastings, Canning, even the grave William Pitt,--all were verse-makers.
Verse-making did not retard--no doubt the qualities essential to
verse-making accelerated--their race to the goal of fame. What great
painters have been verse-makers! Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci,
Salvator Rosa"--and Heaven knows how may other great names Kenelm
Chillingly might have proceeded to add to his list, if the minstrel had
not here interposed.

"What! all those mighty painters were verse-makers?"

"Verse-makers so good, especially Michael Angelo,--the greatest painter
of all,--that they would have had the fame of poets, if, unfortunately
for that goal of fame, their glory in the sister art of painting did not
outshine it. But when you give to your gift of song the modest title of
verse-making, permit me to observe that your gift is perfectly distinct
from that of the verse-maker. Your gift, whatever it may be, could not
exist without some sympathy with the non verse-making human heart.
No doubt in your foot travels, you have acquired not only observant
intimacy with external Nature in the shifting hues at each hour of a
distant mountain, in the lengthening shadows which yon sunset casts on
the waters at our feet, in the habits of the thrush dropped fearlessly
close beside me, in that turf moistened by its neighbourhood to those
dripping rushes, all of which I could describe no less accurately than
you,--a