"Poetry," replied Mr. Stanley, "has of late too much degenerated into personal satire, persiflage, and caricature among one class of writers, while among another it has exhibited the vagrancies of genius without the inspiration, the exuberance of fancy without the curb of judgment, and the eccentricities of invention without the restrictions of taste. The image has been strained, while the verse has been slackened. We have had pleonasm without fullness, and facility without force. Redundancy has been mistaken for plenitude, flimsiness for ease, and distortion for energy. An over desire of being natural has made the poet feeble, and the rage for being simple has sometimes made him silly. The sensibility is sickly, and the elevation vertiginous." "To Cowper," said Sir John, "master of melody as he is, the mischief is partly attributable. Such an original must naturally have a herd of imitators. If they can not attain to his excellences, his faults are always attainable. The resemblance between the master and the scholar is found chiefly in his defects. The determined imitator of an easy writer becomes insipid; of a sublime one, absurd. Cowper's ease appeared his most imitable charm, but ease aggraved is insipidity. His occasional negligences, his disciples adopted uniformly. In Cowper, there might sometimes be carelessness in the verse, but the verse itself was sustained by the vigor of the sentiment. The imitator forgot that his strength lay in the thought; that his buoyant spirit always supported itself; that the figure, though amplified, was never distorted; the image, though bold, was never incongruous; and the illustration, though new, was never false. "The evil, however," continued Sir John, "seems to be correcting itself. The real genius, which exists in several of this whimsical school, I trust, will at length lead them to prune their excrescences, and reform their youthful eccentricities. Their good sense will teach that the surest road to fame is to condescend to tread in the luminous track of their great precursors in the art. They will see that deviation is not always improvement; that whoever wants to be better than nature will infallibly be worse; that truth in taste is as obvious as in morals, and as certain as in mathematics. In other quarters, both the classic and the Gothic muse are emulously soaring, and I hail the restoration of genuine poetry and pure taste." "I must not," said I, "loquacious as I have already been, dismiss the subject of conversation without remarking that I found there was one topic which seemed as uniformly avoided by common consent as if it had been banished by the interdict of absolute authority, and that some forfeiture, or at least dishonor and disgrace, were to follow it on conviction--I mean religion." "Surely, Charles," said Sir John, "you would not convert general conversation into a divinity school, and friendly societies into debating clubs."