Sceptre of the Will is, you must enter his own doors. The proneness of the Poet, easy, kind, frank--except in his Art, artless--compassionate, generous, and, large-thoughted--heaven-aspiring--to neglect, like the lover, (and what else is he but the perpetually enthralled lover of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful?) the earthly and distasteful _Cura Peculî_, is to be counteracted mainly on the side of the Will. Simplicity of desire will go far, and this you may expect in him from Nature--indeed it is the first ground of the fault charged. Next, of stronger avail--not perhaps of more dignity--comes that which is indeed the base, if not yet the edified structure of Common Sense, the plain Intelligence of naked Necessity. No great stretch of intellectual power required, surely, for discovering and knowing his own condition in the work-day world! But the goods of fortune--worldly estate--_money_--shall the "heavenly Essence"--the "celestial Virtue"--the "divine Emanation"--for so loftily has Man spoken of Man--that is within us--crouch down and grovel in this dark, chill den--this grave which Mammon has delved to be to it a pitfall and a prison? BULLER. Ay--why shall the Poet guard and noose the strings of his purse? NORTH. One reason, drawn from the sublimity of his being, stands ever nigh to bow the pliant neck of his Will under the lowly yoke. He _must_--because, according to the manner in which the All-Disposer saw good to order and adjust the constituents and conditions of our human life here below, in him who, of his own will and deed, lays himself under a bond to live by unearned bread, the Moral Soul dies. SEWARD. The Poet is not--and he is--improvident. Nothing in his genius binds him to improvidence. Prudence may accompany sensibility--may accompany ample and soaring contemplations--may accompany creative thought--may accompany the diligent observation of human life and manners--may accompany profound insight into the human heart. These are chief constituents of the poetical mind, and have nothing in them that rejects Prudence. BULLER. Neither do I believe that the more distinguished Poets generally have been culpably unforethinking-- "Vatis avarus Non temere est animus!" I hope so. I should be exceedingly sorry to think that the Bard were apt to give into the most odious of all vices. But the interval is wide from vicious negligence to vicious care: and I hope that somewhere between, and verging from the Golden Mean a little way towards the negligent extreme, might be the proper and earned place of the Poets. TALBOYS.