to be so tenacious of his bite that he will not give over his hold until he feels his teeth meet and bone crack.”  I know all about it, my minstrel boy! for have I not, in my day, given and taken, and shouldered back again when I have been shouldered?  Pray, do not finger your eyes any longer!  Screw your lyre up to concert pitch, and go on with your stridulous performances!  Neither you nor I know how bad may be the taste of our grandchildren, or how high you may stand when they have

  “Made prostitute and profligate the Muse.”

If you cannot be a poet, be a poetaster; and if you cannot be that, be a poetess, or “she-poet,” as Johnson, in his big dictionary, defines the word.  So “gently take all that ungently comes,” and hammer away as sedulously as old Boileau.  Somebody will, undoubtedly, in the next age, relish your rinsings.  A poet, you know, is a prophet.  Console yourself by vaticinating in the bower of your bed-chamber, as you count the feet upon your fingers, your own immortality.  If ’tis a delusion, ’tis a cheap one, to which even a poet can afford to treat himself.  Play with and humor your life, till you fall asleep, and then the care will be over!  Meanwhile, you must be more stupid than I think, if you cannot find somebody to give you your fodder of flattery.  You need not blush, for I know that you like it, and you need not be ashamed of liking it.  We all do,—­we are all women in that regard; although the honestest man to confess it that I ever heard of was Sir Godfrey Kneller, who said to Pope, when he was painting his picture, “I can’t do so well as I should do, unless you flatter me a little; pray, flatter me, Mr. Pope!  You know I love to be flattered.”

You see, my excellent Robert, that, by some hocus-pocus which I do not exactly comprehend, myself, I have introduced a wheel within a wheel, a letter within a letter, a play within a play, after the manner of the old dramatists; and I beg you to make a note that the foregoing admonitions and most sapient counsels are not addressed to you.  You are something of a philosopher; but you are not, like Mr. Stephen Duck, “something of a philosopher and something of a poet”; for I do not believe, O fortunate youth, that you ever invoked the ten ladies minus one in your life; and I shrewdly suspect, that, so far from knowing the difference between a male and a female rhyme, you are unfamiliar with the close family connection between “trees” and “breeze,” or between “love” and “dove.”  My episodical remarks are for the benefit of young Dolce Pianissimo, who has taken, I am sorry to say, to gin, shirt-collars prodigious, and the minor magazines, and whose friends are standing aghast and despairing at his lunacy.  But, after all, ’tis my best irony quite thrown away; for the foolish boy will believe me quite in earnest, and will still be making love to that jade, Mistress Fame, although he knows well enough how many she has jilted.  But as he grows in stature, he may grow in sense.  If you see him very savagely cut up in “The Revolver,” you will recognize the kindly hands which held the bistoury, scalpel, and tenaculum, and the gentleman who wept while he wounded.