and everybody, including Mr. Pope, thought it perfectly sweet at the time. Then what does this degenerate widow do, after giving Mr. Pope every reason to believe that she would fulfil his poetry?' 'She marries again,' I said. 'Quite right; she marries again. But you needn't try to impose upon me, miss! To come to that conclusion you didn't require any previous information whatever! She marries again, and you can't think how it vexed Mr. Pope.' 'I know,' I said, 'he declared that was the last of his lending the use of his genius to widows'--for I had to assume some knowledge of the subject. Miss Corke looked at me. 'You idjit!' she said. 'He did nothing of the sort.' 'Michael Drayton!' I read amongst other names which surprised me by their unfamiliarity; for in America, whatever Peter Corke may say, if we have a strong point, it is names--'who was Michael Drayton? and why was he entitled to a bust?' 'He wrote the "Polyolbion,"' said Miss Corke, as if that were all there was to say about it. 'Do you know,' I said--'I am ashamed to confess it, but even of so well-known and interesting a work of genius as the "Polyolbion" I have committed very few pages to memory!' 'Oh!' returned Miss Peter, 'you're getting unbearable! There's a lovely epitaph for you, of Edmund Spenser's, "whose divine spirrit needs noe othir witnesse than the workes which he left behind him." You will kindly make no ribald remarks about the spelling, as I perceive you are thinking of doing. Try and remember that we taught you to spell over there. And when Edmund Spenser was buried, dear damsel, there came a company of poets to the funeral--Shakespeare, doubtless, among them--and cast into his grave all manner of elegies.' 'Of their own composition?' I inquired. 'Stupid!--certainly! And the pens that wrote them!' I said I thought it a most beautiful and poetic thing to have done, if they kept no copies of the poems, and asked Miss Corke if she believed anything of the kind would be possible now.