These nightly irruptions, though sometimes inconvenient to my friends, were of use to me, as they enabled me to see and judge more of the gay world than I could have done without going in search of it; a risk which I thought bore no proportion to the gain. It was like learning the language of the enemy's country at home. One evening, when we were sitting happily alone in the library, Lady Belfield, working at her embroidery, cheerfully joining in our little discussions, and comparing our peaceful pleasures with those pursued by the occupiers of the countless carriages which were tearing up the "wheel-worn streets," or jostling each other at the door of the next house, where a grand assembly was collecting its myriads--Sir John asked what should be the evening book. Then rising, he took down from the shelf Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination. "Is it," said he, as soon as he sat down, "the rage for novelty, or a real degeneracy of taste, that we now so seldom hear of a poet, who, when I was a boy, was the admiration of every man who had a relish for true genius? I can not defend his principles, since in a work, of which _Man_ is professedly the object, he has overlooked his _immortality_: a subject which one wonders did not force itself upon him, as so congenial to the sublimity of his genius, whatever his religious views might have been. But to speak of him only as a poet; a work which abounds in a richer profusion of images, and a more variegated luxuriance of expression than the Pleasures of Imagination, can not easily be found. The flimsy metre of our day seems to add fresh value to his sinewy verse. We have no happier master of poetic numbers; none who better knew To build the lofty rhyme. The condensed vigor, so indispensable to blank verse, the skillful variation of the pause, the masterly structure of the period, and all the occult mysteries of the art, can, perhaps, be best learned from Akenside. If he could have conveyed to Thomson his melody and rhyme, and Thomson would have paid him back in perspicuity and transparency of meaning, how might they have enriched each other!" "I confess," said I, "in reading Akenside, I have now and then found the same passage at once enchanting and unintelligible. As it happens to many frequenters of the opera, the music always transports, but the words are not always understood." I then desired my friend to gratify us with the first book of the Pleasures of Imagination. Sir John is a passionate lover of poetry, in which he has a fine taste. He read it with much spirit and feeling, especially these truly classical lines, _Mind, Mind_ alone, bear witness earth and heaven, The living fountains in itself contains Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand Sit paramount the graces; here enthroned Celestial Venus, with divinest airs Invites the soul to never-fading joy.