paper, thinking no more about it!"

"When I was younger," said Miss Spight--she didn't say when she was
"young," mark you--"no young gentlewoman's education would have been
thought complete without a course of the best poets, such as Milton's
_Paradise Lost_."

"Which nine out of ten of the people who speak about it now, never
read," said I--and, Miss Spight did not reply.

"What queer people poets are, generally speaking," said Mr Mawley.

"Do you think so?" said I.

"Yes, I do," he replied. "I would divide poets into three great
classes, which I would call respectively the enthusiastic school, the
water-cart school, and the horse-going-round-in-the-mill school."

"O-oh, Mr Mawley!" exclaimed Bessie Dasher, in the unmeaning manner
common to young ladies, in lieu of saying anything, when they have got
nothing to say: the exclamation expressing either astonishment, horror,
alarm, or rebuke, as the case may require.

"Instance, instance! Name, name!" said I, keeping the curate up to the
mark.

"Well, I will give you Horner, and Dante, Goethe, Byron, and, perhaps,
Tennyson, from which to take your choice amongst those whom I call the
enthusiastic school; Mrs Hemans, and others of her tearful race, in the
second; and, in the third order, the majority of those who have spoilt
good ink and paper, from Dryden down to Martin F Tupper."

"What, no exceptions; not even my favourite Longfellow?" asked Min.

"No," said Mr Mawley, "not one--although Longfellow belongs more by
rights to the water-cart line. The fact is," continued he, fairly
started on his hobby, "that Pegasus, the charger of Mount Parnassus, is
a most eccentric animal, who can be made to metamorphose himself so
completely according to the skill and ability or weakness of his rider,
that even Apollo would not recognise him sometimes! When backed by an
intrepid spirit, like the grand heroic poets, Pegasus is the stately
war-horse eager for the fray, and sniffing the battle from afar; or
else, controlled by the nervous reins of genius like that of Shelley and
Coleridge, he appears as the high-mettled racer, pure-blooded and
finely-trained, who may win some great race, but is unfit for any
ordinary work; or, again, when ridden by a Wordsworth, he plods along
wearily, with lack-lustre eyes, dragging a heavy load, such as _The
Excursion_, behind him!"

What the curate might have said further was lost to his hearers. Just
at this moment, on turning a bend