More than twenty years subsequent to this period, after much wandering about the world, returning to my native country, I was invited to a literary tea-party, where, the discourse turning upon poetry, I, in order to show that I was not more ignorant than my neighbours, began to talk about Byron, for whose writings I really entertained considerable admiration, though I had no particular esteem for the man himself.  At first, I received no answer to what I said—­the company merely surveying me with a kind of sleepy stare.  At length a lady, about the age of forty, with a large wart on her face, observed, in a drawling tone, “That she had not read Byron—­at least, since her girlhood—­and then only a few passages; but that the impression on her mind was, that his writings were of a highly objectionable character.”  “I also read a little of him in my boyhood,” said a gentleman about sixty, but who evidently, from his dress and demeanour, wished to appear about thirty, “but I highly disapproved of him; for, notwithstanding he was a nobleman, he is frequently very coarse, and very fond of raising emotion.  Now emotion is what I dislike;” drawling out the last syllable of the word dislike.  “There is only one poet for me—­the divine—­” and then he mentioned a name which I had only once heard, and afterwards quite forgotten; the same mentioned by the snorer in the field.  “Ah! there is no one like him!” murmured some more of the company; “the poet of nature—­of nature without its vulgarity.”  I wished very much to ask these people whether they were ever bad sleepers, and whether they had read the poet, so called, from a desire of being set to sleep.  Within a few days, however, I learnt that it had of late become very fashionable and genteel to appear half asleep, and that one could exhibit no better mark of superfine breeding than by occasionally in company setting one’s rhomal organ in action.  I then ceased to wonder at the popularity, which I found nearly universal, of -’s poetry; for, certainly in order to make one’s self appear sleepy in company, or occasionally to induce sleep, nothing could be more efficacious than a slight prelection of his poems.  So poor Byron, with his fire and emotion—­to say nothing of his mouthings and coxcombry—­was dethroned, as I prophesied he would be more than twenty years before, on the day of his funeral, though I had little idea that his humiliation would have been brought about by one, whose sole strength consists in setting people to sleep.  Well, all things are doomed to terminate in sleep.  Before that termination, however, I will venture to prophesy that people will become a little more awake—­snoring and yawning be a little less in fashion—­and poor Byron be once more reinstated on his throne, though his rival will always stand a good chance of being worshipped by those whose ruined nerves are insensible to the narcotic powers of opium and morphine.

CHAPTER XXIII