ill. Let me live in the Elysium of
those soft looks; poison me with kisses, kill me with smiles; but still
mock me with thy love!(4)

Poets choose mistresses who have the fewest charms, that they may make
something out of nothing. They succeed best in fiction, and they apply
this rule to love. They make a goddess of any dowdy. As Don Quixote
said, in answer to the matter-of-fact remonstrances of Sancho, that
Dulcinea del Toboso answered the purpose of signalising his valour just
as well as the 'fairest princess under sky,' so any of the fair sex
will serve them to write about just as well as another. They take some
awkward thing and dress her up in fine words, as children dress up a
wooden doll in fine clothes. Perhaps a fine head of hair, a taper waist,
or some other circumstance strikes them, and they make the rest out
according to their fancies. They have a wonderful knack of supplying
deficiencies in the subjects of their idolatry out of the storehouse
of their imaginations. They presently translate their favourites to the
skies, where they figure with Berenice's locks and Ariadne's crown. This
predilection for the unprepossessing and insignificant, I take to arise
not merely from a desire in poets to have some subject to exercise their
inventive talents upon, but from their jealousy of any pretensions
(even those of beauty in the other sex) that might interfere with the
continual incense offered to their personal vanity.

Cardinal Mazarine never thought anything of Cardinal de Retz after he
told him that he had written for the last thirty years of his life with
the same pen. Some Italian poet going to present a copy of verses to the
Pope, and finding, as he was looking them over in the coach as he
went, a mistake of a single letter in the printing, broke his heart
of vexation and chagrin. A still more remarkable case of literary
disappointment occurs in the history of a countryman of his, which I
cannot refrain from giving here, as I find it related. 'Anthony Codrus
Urceus, a most learned and unfortunate Italian, born near Modena, 1446,
was a striking instance,' says his biographer, 'of the miseries men
bring upon themselves by setting their affections unreasonably on
trifles. This learned man lived at Forli, and had an apartment in the
palace. His room was so very dark that he was forced to use a candle
in the daytime; and one day, going abroad without putting it out, his
library was set on fire, and some papers