BULLER. Mille gratias. NORTH. The nascent and adolescent Orator is moulded to the power of the word by the greatest masters of the word, the Poets! Tell this, O Poet, in imperial ears! Then speak modestly, withdrawingly, insinuatingly. Hide the boast. It is hidden--and shown. The Poet fashions the tender and stammering mouth of the boy. The rudiments of pronunciation--The Orator nascent. No more. It is pretty and gentle that the Muse herself condescends to the care of moulding the young soft lip to the pure musical utterance of Latium's magnificent Mother-tongue. BULLER. Now I see it all. The occultation! NORTH. But She delays not undertaking a nobler and more momentous function. From the bodily organs She passes to the governing mind. And of the Mind at once to the nobler part, the Will. She is the young Roman's Moral Tutress. Horace is brief. What these her first lessons to the soul are, he does not say. He tells you their powerful virtue. They _wrest_, he says, (_torquet_,) the charmed hearing from dishonest, from gross and grovelling, from depraving and polluting discourse. You may, my friends, imagine Phædrus' feeling Fables, or the "Lays of Ancient Rome;" or at Athens, instead of Rome, the Iliad. TALBOYS. It is the hint but of a line, sir. But each of us may know in himself how early the Muse really did begin to possess our spirits with thoughts, and scenes, and actions that soared away from the presences of our lives--that She did "Lift us in aspiration from the earth." And as the pupil grows, the discipline of the divine Instructress ripens. With precepts that are the counsels of a dear and wise friend, she moulds the susceptible compliant bosom. She softens his rough self-will--weeds out envy--and curbs anger. BULLER. Talboys, you expound Flaccus well. TALBOYS. Her storial informations, pictures from human existence, take now a more direct purpose. She recites deeds justly and virtuously done; She furnishes and arms--_instruit_--the springing generation with high transmitted examples. NORTH. Ay, my dear Talboys, _He_ is thinking now-- BULLER. Hitherto you have always said _She_-- NORTH. I have. "She" is really "He"--the Poet and not the Muse. I was rapt. He is thinking now, my dear Buller, of old strong-hearted Ennius--the heroic annalist, in soldierly rough verses, of younger heroic Rome. We may recollect, for the nonce, whatever is most English, and most Scottish, and most heroic, in those more musical "histories" of William, and of Walter. TALBOYS.