To shrine that page of history in song, And utter such tremendous cadences, That the mere babe who hears them at the breast, _Sans_ comprehension, or the power of thought, Shall be an idiot to its dying hour! I deemed my verse would make pale Hecate’s orb Grow wan and dark; and into ashes change The radiant star-dust of the milky-way. I deemed that pestilence, disease, and death Would follow every strophe—for the power Of a true poet, prophet as he is, Should rack creation! If this view of the powers of poets and poetry be correct, commend us to the continuance of a lengthened period of prose! Firmilian then begins to look about him for a new subject, and a new course of initiative discipline. Magic first occurs to him—but he very speedily abandons that idea, from a natural terror of facing the fiend, and a wholesome dread of the Inquisition. He admits having made already one or two experiments in that line, and narrates, with evident horror, how he drew a chalk circle in his apartments, kindled a brazier, and began an incantation, when suddenly a lurid light appeared in the sockets of a skull upon the shelf, and so nearly threw him into convulsions that he could barely mutter the exorcism. (It appears, from another part of the poem, that this exploit had been detected by his servant, a spy of the Inquisition, in consequence of his having neglected to erase the cabalistic markings in chalk, and was of course immediately reported.) At last he determines to fall back upon sensuality, and to devote his unexampled talents to a grand poem upon the amours of the Heathen deities. He states, with much show of truth, that the tone of morals which an exclusively classical education is apt to give, cannot but be favourable to an extensive and sublime erotic undertaking—and that the youthful appetite, early stimulated by the perusal of the Pantheon, and the works of Ovid, Juvenal, and Catullus, will eagerly turn to anything in the vernacular which promises still stronger excitement. We shall not venture, at the present, to apply ourselves seriously to that question.