This great dramatic poet, whose name is Fanor, has a way of manufacturing dramas as ingenious as it is simple. He first goes to Mr. Puff’s Pug and demands a subject, next he makes his way to Mr. Scribe’s Poodle and engages him to write it. When the play is put on the stage, he employs six pariahs to applaud it, brutes they are who bark savagely. He is a wonderful fellow. Fanor wears his coat well brushed and most artistically curled, altogether he is just the sort of cur to wait upon rank and bow it into the boxes. The play was said to be new. Let us skip the first scene. It is always the same—servants and confidants explaining the nature of the crimes, griefs, intrigues, virtues, or ambitions of their masters. Do you know, my master, it was perhaps a great mistake to remove the muzzles of our poets. The traffic in the sublime has been left to an unmuzzled race of poodle-dog poetasters. It was not so with the ancients who wore the bands of art, and who dwelt far from the common crowd within the temple of the Muses. As well-fed watchdogs, they were thus restrained from poking their noses into the accumulated filth of history. There is more in the muzzle than one would think. It is a safeguard against the spread of the hydrophobia of literature, so prevalent in our own times, and requiring all the bullets of cold-blooded critics to keep it in check. Evils other than the unnatural howlings and riot of modern tragedy are caused by liberty. There is an unearthing of old bones, which are scraped, polished, and displayed as the product of that modern genius the nineteenth-century dramatist, who with tragic instinct consigns the memory of their real owners to eternal death and oblivion. The tendency of some grovelling dogs thus to become resurrectionists is too well known to require further comment at my hands. Death to those who before us said what we will to say, “_Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!_”