ress: if that is 'The Forest Sanctuary' which you
have taken up, I am sure you will bear me out in my admiration."

Vincent turned over the leaves with the quiet cynicism of manner
habitual to him; but his countenance grew animated after he had read
two pages. "This is, indeed, beautiful," said he, "really and genuinely
beautiful. How singular that such a work should not be more known; I
never met with it before. But whose pencil marks are these?"

"Mine, I believe," said Ellen, modestly.

"Well," said Lady Roseville, "I fear we shall never have any popular
poet in our time, now that Lord Byron is dead."

"So the booksellers say," replied Vincent; "but I doubt it: there will
be always a certain interregnum after the death of a great poet, during
which, poetry will be received with distaste, and chiefly for this
reason, that nearly all poetry about the same period, will be of the
same school as the most popular author. Now the public soon wearies of
this monotony; and no poetry, even equally beautiful with that of the
most approved writer, will become popular, unless it has the charm of
variety. It must not be perfect in the old school, it must be daring
in a new one;--it must effect a through revolution in taste, and build
itself a temple out of the ruins of the old worship. All this a great
genius may do, if he will take the pains to alter, radically, the style
he may have formed already. He must stoop to the apprenticeship before
he aspires to the mastery. C'est un metier que de faire un livre comme
de faire une pendule."

"I must confess, for my part," said Lord Edward Neville (an author of
some celebrity and more merit), "that I was exceedingly weary of those
doleful ditties with which we were favoured for so many years. No sooner
had Lord Byron declared himself unhappy, than every young gentleman with
a pale face and dark hair, used to think himself justified in frowning
in the glass and writing Odes to Despair. All persons who could scribble
two lines were sure to make them into rhymes of 'blight' and 'night.'
Never was there so grand a penchant for the triste."

"It would be interesting enough," observed Vincent, "to trace the origin
of this melancholy mania. People are wrong to attribute it to poor Lord
Byron--it certainly came from Germany; perhaps Werter was the first hero
of that school."

"There seems," said I, "an unaccountable prepossession among all
persons, to imagine that whatever seems gloomy mu