The Honourable Mrs. Pinmoney drew Anthelia into a corner, and developed all her eloquence in enforcing the proposition. Miss Danaretta joined in it with great earnestness; and they kept up the fire of their importunity till they extorted from Anthelia a promise that she would consider of it. Mr. Forester took down a splendid edition of Tasso, printed by Bodoni at Parma, and found it ornamented with Anthelia’s drawings. In the magic of her pencil the wild and wonderful scenes of Tasso seemed to live under his eyes: he could not forbear expressing to her the delight he experienced from these new proofs of her sensibility and genius, and entered into a conversation with her concerning her favourite poet, in which the congeniality of their tastes and feelings became more and more manifest to each other. Mr. Feathernest and Mr. Derrydown got into a hot dispute over Chapman’s _Homer_ and Jeremy Taylor’s _Holy Living_: Mr. Derrydown maintaining that the ballad metre which Chapman had so judiciously chosen rendered his volume the most divine poem in the world; Mr. Feathernest asserting that Chapman’s verses were mere doggerel: which vile aspersion Mr. Derrydown revenged by depreciating Mr. Feathernest’s favourite Jeremy. Mr. Feathernest said he could expect no better judgment from a man who was mad enough to prefer _Chevy Chase_ to _Paradise Lost_; and Mr. Derrydown retorted, that it was idle to expect either taste or justice from one who had thought fit to unite in himself two characters so anomalous as those of a poet and a critic, in which duplex capacity he had first deluged the world with torrents of execrable verses, and then written anonymous criticisms to prove them divine. ‘Do you think, sir,’ he continued, ‘that it is possible for the same man to be both Homer and Aristotle? No, sir; but it is very possible to be both Dennis and Colley Cibber, as in the melancholy example before me.’ At this all the blood of the _genus irritabile_ boiled in Mr. Feathernest’s veins, and uplifting the ponderous folio, he seemed inclined to bury his antagonist under Jeremy’s _weight of words_, by applying them in a _tangible shape_; but wisely recollecting that this was not the time and place To prove his doctrine orthodox By apostolic blows and knocks,