We must confess to some negligent tendencies in the Poet. The warm sympathies give advantage to designing beggars of different ranks--and are themselves betraying advisers. The law of the poetical mind to accept Impression, and let it have its way, if it overflow its legitimate channel of poetical study and art, and irregularly lay the conduct of life under water, may leave behind it something else than fertility. The dwelling in pleasure may make the narrow and exact cares of economy irksome. But why shall we _expect_ that a man of high, clear, and strong mind shall not learn how to--cut his coat according to his cloth? NORTH. I am afraid that the high faculties of a Poet threaten to endanger his vulgar welfare. The foundation of his poetical being and power, as you well have hinted, Talboys, is the free spontaneity of motion in his own mind--the surrendering of his whole spirit to influxes and self-impulses. The spontaneous movement allies his temperament to common passion, which founds upon this very characteristic. And you sometimes see, accordingly, that the Poet is a victim sacrificed for the benefit of the rest. Not that it need be so--for he has his own means of protection; but powers delicate, sensitive, profound, must walk perilously in a lapsed world. SEWARD. Let it be allowed, then, to Dugald, that the poetical temperament is adverse to getting--and to keeping--money--and that a touching picture might be drawn of the conflicts of spirit between a Poet and his false position in a counting-house--or with "poverty's unconquerable bar." NORTH. "This carelessness about the goods of fortune," says Mr Stewart, "is an infirmity very naturally resulting from their studies, and is only to be cured by years and experience, or by combination (_very rare indeed_) of poetical genius with a more than ordinary share of that 'homely endowment called _common-sense_.'" And wherefore any infirmity? Why not have portrayed rather--or at least kindly qualified the word--in winning hues, or in lofty shape--the delicious or magnanimous UNWORLDLINESS of the poetical character? That most ennobling, and most unostentatious quality, which dear and great Goddess--in lovingly tempering a soul that from its first inhalation of terrestrial air to the breath in which it escapes home, she intends to follow with her love--commingles in precious and perilous atoms that, in consecrating, destine to sorrow. SEWARD. An infirmity? A charm--a grace--and a virtue! Alas! sir, a virtue too suitable to the golden age to be safe in ours. TALBOYS. Ay, Seward, a virtue demanding the correction or the protection of some others, which the iron generations countenance or allow--such as Prudence, Justice, Affection for those whose welfare he unavoidably commixes with his own.