the book into his hands.  On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen:  he devoted three entire years to the plan without composing a single line.  He was greatly at a loss in what manner to execute his work.  There were no successful specimens of versification in the German language before this time.  The first three cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose.  This, though done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him.  He had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of versification.  These were only of very moderate merit.—­One day he was struck with the idea of what could be done in this way—­he kept his room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of what he had before written in prose.  From that time, pleased with his efforts, he composed no more in prose.  To-day he informed me that he had finished his plan before he read Milton.  He was enchanted to see an author who before him had trod the same path.  This is a contradiction of what he said before.  He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one till it was finished:  but some of his friends who had seen what he had finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in a journal.  He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five.  The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time.  The reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering.  He was nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty years not more than two were employed in the composition.  He only composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations.  He values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical writers of gross deficiency in this respect.  I laid the same accusation against Horace:  he would not hear of it—­but waived the discussion.  He called Rousseau’s ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dissertation in stanzas.[230] I spoke of Dryden’s ST. CECILIA; but be did not seem familiar with our writers.  He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and epic blank verse.

[230] (A la Fortune.  Liv.  II.  Ode vi.  Oeuvres de Jean Baptiste Rousseau, p.121, edit. 1820.  One of the latter strophes of this ode concludes with two lines, which, as the editor observes, have become a proverb, and of which the thought and expression are borrowed from Lucretius:  cripitur persona, manet res: III. v. 58.

Montrez nous, guerriers magnanimes, Votre vertu dans tout son jour:  Voyons comment vos coeurs sublimes Du sort soutiendront le retour.  Tant que sa faveur vous seconde, Vous etes les maitres du monde, Votre gloire nous eblouit:  Mais au moindre revers funeste, Le masque tombe, l’homme reste, Et le heros s’evanouit.

Horace, says the Editor, en traitant ce meme sujet,