[50] Basil the Macedonian was originally a groom, and owed his first step in the imperial favour of the Drunkard to his powers as a whisperer. He broke an ungovernable horse belonging to the emperor, by the exercise of this singular quality, and rendered it, to the amazement of the whole court, as tame as a sheep. Leo Grammaticus says, [Greek: Te men mia cheiri ton chalinon kratesas, te de hetera tou otos draxamenos eis eme*rot*eta probatou metebalon].--P. 230, ed. Bonn. [51] _Georgius Monachus_, p. 540. _Simeon Metaph._ p. 449. _Scriptores post Theophanem_, ed. Paris. _Leo Gramm._, p. 469, ed. Paris, p. 247, ed. Bonn. [52] Things have not changed in our day. Capodistrias lighted his pipe with Canning's treaties and King Leopold's renunciation; and Colettis makes game of the feeble acts and strong expressions of Viscount Palmerston. ANCIENT AND MODERN BALLAD POETRY.[53] The first day of April is a festival too prominent in the Kalendar of Momus to be passed over without due commemoration. The son of Nox, who, according to that prince of heralds, Hesiod, presides especially over the destinies of reviewers, demands a sacrifice at our hands; and as, in the present state of the provision market, we cannot afford to squander a steer, we shall sally forth into the regions of rhyme and attempt to capture a versifier. The time has been when such a task was, to say the least of it, very simple. Each successive spring, at the season when "a livelier iris glows upon the burnished dove," Parnassus sent forth its leaves, and the voices of many cuckoos were heard throughout the land. Small difficulty then, either to flush or to bag sufficient game. But, somehow or other, of late years there has been a sort of panic among the poets. The gentler sort have either been scared by the improvisatore warblings of Mr Wakley, or terrified into silence by undue and undeserved apprehensions of the Knout. Seldom now are they heard to chirrup except under cover of the leaves of a sheltering magazine; and although we do occasionally detect a thin and ricketty octavo taking flight from the counter of some publisher, it is of so meek and inoffensive a kind that we should as soon think of making prize of a thrush in a bed of strawberries. We are much afraid that the tendency of the present age towards the facetious has contributed not a little to the dearth of sonnets and the extermination of the elegiac stanza. So long as friend Michael Angelo Titmarsh has the privilege of frequenting the house of Mrs Perkins and other haunts of fashionable and literary celebrity, Poseidon Hicks will relapse into gloomy silence, and Miss Bunion refrain from chanting her Lays of the Shattered Heart-strings. It a hard thing that a poet may not protrude his gentle sorrows for our commiseration, mourn over his blighted hopes, or rejoice the bosom of some budding virgin by celebrating her, in his Tennysonian measure, as the