Well, this passage Burke, assuming his correspondent to be familiar with it, boldly claps into prose and inserts into a long diatribe against Pitt for having tamely submitted to the rebuffs of the French Directory.  Thus it becomes:—­

On that day it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars:  that he would bid to be brought forth from their hideous Kennel (where his scrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs of War, whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance that feeds them; that he would let them loose in Famine, Plagues and Death, upon a guilty race to whose frame and to all whose habit, Order, Peace, Religion and Virtue, are alien and abhorrent.

Now Shakespeare is but apologising for the shortcomings of his’ play-house, whereas Burke is denouncing his country’s shame and prophesying disaster to Europe.  Yet do you not feel with me that while Shakespeare, using great words on the lowlier subject, contrives to make them appropriate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, the same or similar words have become tumid, turgid?

Why?  I am sure that the difference lies not in the two men:  nor is it all the secret, or even half the secret, that Burke is mixing up the spoken with the written word, using the one while pretending to use the other.  That has carried us some way; but now let us take an important step farther.  The root of the matter lies in certain essential differences between verse and prose.  We will keep, if you please, to our rough practical definitions.  Literature—­the written word—­is a permanent record of memorable speech; a record, at any rate, intended to be permanent.  We set a thing down in ink—­we print it in a book—­because we feel it to be memorable, to be worth preserving.  But to set this memorable speech down we must choose one of two forms, verse or prose; and I define verse to be a record in metre and rhythm, prose to be a record which, dispensing with metre (abhorring it indeed), uses rhythm laxly, preferring it to be various and unconstrained, so always that it convey a certain pleasure to the ear.

You observe that I avoid the term Poetry, over which the critics have waged, and still are waging, a war that promises to be endless.  Is Walt Whitman a poet?  Is the Song of Songs (which is not Solomon’s)—­is the Book of Job—­are the Psalms—­all of these as rendered in our Authorised Version of Holy Writ—­are all of these poetry?  Well ‘yes,’ if you want my opinion; and again ‘yes,’ I am sure.  But truly on this field, though scores of great men have fought across it—­Sidney, Shelley, Coleridge, Scaliger (I pour the names on you at random), Johnson, Wordsworth, the two Schlegels, Aristotle with Twining his translator, Corneille, Goethe, Warton, Whately, Hazlitt, Emerson, Hegel, Gummere—­but our axles grow hot.  Let us put on the brake:  for in practice the dispute comes to very little:  since literature is an art and treats scientific definitions as J. K. Stephen recommended.  From them