urs, began to talk
about Byron, for whose writings I really entertained a considerable
admiration, though I had no particular esteem for the man himself. At
first I received no answer to what I said--the company merely surveying
me with a kind of sleepy stare. At length a lady, about the age of
forty, with a large wart on her face, observed, in a drawling tone, 'That
she had not read Byron--at least since her girlhood--and then only a few
passages; but that the impression on her mind was, that his writings were
of a highly objectionable character.' 'I also read a little of him in my
boyhood,' said a gentleman, about sixty, but who evidently, from his
dress and demeanour, wished to appear about thirty, 'but I highly
disapproved of him; for, notwithstanding he was a nobleman, he is
frequently very coarse, and very fond of raising emotion. Now emotion is
what I dislike;' drawling out the last syllable of the word dislike.
'There is only one poet for me--the divine ---'; and then he mentioned a
name which I had only once heard, and afterwards quite forgotten; the
name mentioned by the snorer in the field. 'Ah! there is no one like
him!' murmured some more of the company; 'the poet of nature--of nature
without its vulgarity.' I wished very much to ask these people whether
they were ever bad sleepers, and whether they had read the poet, so
called, from a desire of being set to sleep. Within a few days, however,
I learnt that it had of late become very fashionable and genteel to
appear half asleep, and that one could exhibit no better mark of
superfine breeding than by occasionally in company setting one's ronchal
organ in action. I then ceased to wonder at the popularity, which I
found nearly universal, of ---'s poetry; for, certainly in order to make
one's self appear sleepy in company, or occasionally to induce sleep,
nothing could be more efficacious than a slight pre-lection of his poems.
So, poor Byron, with his fire and emotion--to say nothing of his
mouthings and coxcombry--was dethroned, as I had prophesied he would be
more than twenty years before, on the day of his funeral, though I had
little idea that his humiliation would have been brought about by one,
whose sole strength consists in setting people to sleep. Well, all
things are doomed to terminate in sleep. Before that termination,
however, I will venture to prophesy that people will become a little more
awake--snoring and yawning be a little less in fa