er of that name. Nothing can be more
characteristic of his mind than this circumstance. All his ideas indeed
are like a river, flowing on for ever, and still murmuring as it flows,
discharging its waters and still replenished--

"And so by many winding nooks it strays,
With willing sport to the wild ocean!"

[137] The description of the sports in the forest:

"To see the sun to bed and to arise,
Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes," etc.

[138] Perhaps the finest scene in all these novels, is that where the
Dominie meets his pupil, Miss Lucy, the morning after her brother's
arrival.

[139] This essay was written just before Lord Byron's death.

[140]
"Don Juan was my Moscow, and Faliero
My Leipsic, and my Mont St. Jean seems Cain."

_Don Juan_, Canto XI.

[141] This censure applies to the first cantos of DON JUAN much more than
to the last. It has been called a TRISTRAM SHANDY in rhyme: it is rather a
poem written about itself.

[142] Burke's writings are not poetry, notwithstanding the vividness of
the fancy, because the subject matter is abstruse and dry, not natural,
but artificial. The difference between poetry and eloquence is, that the
one is the eloquence of the imagination, and the other of the
understanding. Eloquence tries to persuade the will, and convince the
reason: poetry produces its effects by instantaneous sympathy. Nothing is
a subject for poetry that admits of a dispute. Poets are in general bad
prose-writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are not to
the purpose, and do not carry on the argument. The French poetry wants the
forms of the imagination. It is didactic more than dramatic. And some of
our own poetry, which has been most admired, is only poetry in the rhyme,
and in the studied use of poetic diction.

[143] My father was one of those who mistook his talent after all. He used
to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred his Letters to his Sermons.
The last were forced and dry; the first came naturally from him. For ease,
half-plays on words, and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have
never seen them equalled.

[144] He complained in particular of the presumption of his attempting to
establish the future immortality of man, "without" (as he said) "knowing
what Death was or what Life was"--and the tone in which he pronounced
these two words seemed to convey a complete image of both.

[145] He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Rap