We do not, however, quarrel with a poet for having an exalted idea of his art—always supposing that he has taken any pains to acquire its rudiments. Without a high feeling of this kind, it would be difficult to maintain the struggle which must precede eminent success; nor would we have alluded to the subject but for the affectation and offensive swaggering of some who may indeed be rhymsters, but who never could be poets even if their days were to be prolonged to the extent of those of Methusaleh. When the painter of the tavern sign-post, whereon is depicted a beer-bottle voiding its cork, and spontaneously ejecting its contents right and left into a couple of convenient tumblers, talks to us of high art, Raphael, and the effects of _chiaroscuro_, it is utterly impossible to control the action of the risible muscles. And, in like manner, when one of our young poetical aspirants, on the strength of a trashy duodecimo filled with unintelligible ravings, asserts his claim to be considered as a prophet and a teacher, it is beyond the power of humanity to check the intolerable tickling of the midriff. But, apart from their exaggerated notions of their calling, let us see what is the practice of the poets of the Spasmodic School. In the first place, they rarely, if ever, attempt anything like a plot. After you have finished the perusal of their verses, you find yourself just as wise as when you began. You cannot tell what they would be at. You have a confused recollection of stars, and sunbeams, and moonbeams, as if you had been staring at an orrery; but sun, moon, and stars, were intended to give light to something—and what that something is, in the poet’s page, you cannot, for the life of you, discover. In the second place, we regret to say that they are often exceedingly profane, not, we suppose, intentionally, but because they have not sense enough to see the limits which decency, as well as duty, prescribes. In the third place, they are occasionally very prurient. And, in the fourth place, they are almost always unintelligible. Now, although we cannot by any means aver that Mr Percy Jones is entirely free from the faults which we have just enumerated, we look upon him as a decidedly favourable specimen of his tribe. There is, in _Firmilian_, if not a plot, at least some kind of comprehensible action; and in it he has portrayed the leading features of the poetical school to which he belongs with so much fidelity and effect, that we feel called upon to give an outline of his tragedy, with a few specimens from the more remarkable scenes.