his death; and, not long after it, States negotiated for his ashes, and disputed for the sites of the composition of the Divina Commedia.  Petrarch was crowned in the Capitol.  Ariosto was permitted to pass free by the public robber who had read the Orlando Furioso.  I would not recommend Mr. * * to try the same experiment with his Smugglers.  Tasso, notwithstanding the criticisms of the Cruscanti, would have been crowned in the Capitol, but for his death.

“It is easy to prove the immediate popularity of the chief poets of the only modern nation in Europe that has a poetical language, the Italian.  In our own, Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Waller, Dryden, Congreve, Pope, Young, Shenstone, Thomson, Johnson, Goldsmith, Gray, were all as popular in their lives as since.  Gray’s Elegy pleased instantly, and eternally.  His Odes did not, nor yet do they please like his Elegy.  Milton’s politics kept him down; but the Epigram of Dryden, and the very sale of his work, in proportion to the less reading time of its publication, prove him to have been honoured by his contemporaries.  I will venture to assert, that the sale of the Paradise Lost was greater in the first four years after its publication than that of ‘The Excursion,’ in the same number, with the difference of nearly a century and a half between them of time, and of thousands in point of general readers.

“It may be asked, why, having this opinion of the present state of poetry in England, and having had it long, as my friends and others well know—­possessing, or having possessed too, as a writer, the ear of the public for the time being—­I have not adopted a different plan in my own compositions, and endeavoured to correct rather than encourage the taste of the day.  To this I would answer, that it is easier to perceive the wrong than to pursue the right, and that I have never contemplated the prospect ’of filling (with Peter Bell, see its Preface,) permanently a station in the literature of the country.’  Those who know me best, know this, and that I have been considerably astonished at the temporary success of my works, having flattered no person and no party, and expressed opinions which are not those of the general reader.  Could I have anticipated the degree of attention which has been accorded, assuredly I would have studied more to deserve it.  But I have lived in far countries abroad, or in the agitating world at home, which was not favourable to study or reflection; so that almost all I have written has been mere passion,—­passion, it is true, of different kinds, but always passion:  for in me (if it be not an Irishism to say so) my indifference was a kind of passion, the result of experience, and not the philosophy of nature.  Writing grows a habit, like a woman’s gallantry:  there are women who have had no intrigue, but few who have had but one only; so there are millions of men who have never written a book, but few who have written only one.