“’If you have written anything which you think well of, show it to
Mr.______ , the well-known critic; to “the governor,” as you call
him,—­your honored father; and to me, your friend.’

“To the critic is well enough, if you like to be overhauled and put out of conceit with yourself,—­it may do you good; but I wouldn’t go to ’the governor’ with my verses, if I were you.  For either he will think what you have written is something wonderful, almost as good as he could have written himself,—­in fact, he always did believe in hereditary genius,—­or he will pooh-pooh the whole rhyming nonsense, and tell you that you had a great deal better stick to your business, and leave all the word-jingling to Mother Goose and her followers.

“‘Show me your verses,’ says Horace.  Very good it was in him, and mighty encouraging the first counsel he gives!  ’Keep your poem to yourself for some eight or ten years; you will have time to look it over, to correct it and make it fit to present to the public.’

“‘Much obliged for your advice,’ says the poor poet, thirsting for a draught of fame, and offered a handful of dust.  And off he hurries to the printer, to be sure that his poem comes out in the next number of the magazine he writes for.”

“Is not poetry the natural language of lovers?”

It was the Tutor who asked this question, and I thought he looked in the direction of Number Five, as if she might answer his question.  But Number Five stirred her tea devotedly; there was a lump of sugar, I suppose, that acted like a piece of marble.  So there was a silence while the lump was slowly dissolving, and it was anybody’s chance who saw fit to take up the conversation.

The voice that broke the silence was not the sweet, winsome one we were listening for, but it instantly arrested the attention of the company.  It was the grave, manly voice of one used to speaking, and accustomed to be listened to with deference.  This was the first time that the company as a whole had heard it, for the speaker was the new-comer who has been repeatedly alluded to,—­the one of whom I spoke as “the Counsellor.”

“I think I can tell you something about that,” said the Counsellor.  “I suppose you will wonder how a man of my profession can know or interest himself about a question so remote from his arid pursuits.  And yet there is hardly one man in a thousand who knows from actual experience a fraction of what I have learned of the lovers’ vocabulary in my professional experience.  I have, I am sorry to say, had to take an important part in a great number of divorce cases.  These have brought before me scores and hundreds of letters, in which every shade of the great passion has been represented.  What has most struck me in these amatory correspondences has been their remarkable sameness.  It seems as if writing love-letters reduced all sorts of people to the same level.  I don’t remember whether Lord Bacon has left us anything in that line,—­unless,