“But still that was quite a different thing,” Lady Anne said, “from having them in her _album_; so Mr. Harrington must be so very good.” I did not understand the particular use of copying in my illegible hand what could be so much better read in print; but it was all-sufficient that her ladyship chose it. When I had copied the verses I must, Lady Anne said, read the lines, and admire them. But I had read them twenty times before, and I could not say that they were as fresh the twentieth reading as at the first. Lord Mowbray came in, and she ran to her brother:--“Mowbray! can any thing in nature be prettier than these verses of Lord Chesterfield? Mowbray, you, who are a judge, listen to these two lines: ‘The dews of the evening moat carefully shun, Those tears of the sky for the loss of the sun.’ _Now_, here’s your friend, Mr. Harrington, says it’s only a _prettiness_, and something about Ovid. I’m sure I wish you’d advise some of your friends to leave their classics, as you did, at the musty university. What have we to do with Ovid in London? You, yourself, Mr. Harrington, who set up for such a critic, what fault can you find, pray, with ‘Keep all cold from your breast, there’s already too much?’” By the lady’s tone of voice, raised complexion, and whole air of the head, I saw the danger was imminent, and to avoid the coming storm, I sheltered myself under the cover of modesty; but Mowbray dragged me out to make sport for himself. “Oh! Harrington, that will never do. No critic! No judge! You! with all your college honours fresh about you. Come, come, Harrington, pronounce you must. Is this poetry or not? ‘_Keep all cold from your breast, there’s already too much_.’” “Whether prose or poetry, I pronounce it to be very good advice.” “Good advice! the thing of all others I have the most detested from my childhood,” cried Lady Anne; “but I insist upon it, it is good poetry, Mr. Harrington.” “And equally good grammar, and good English, and good sense,” cried her brother, in an ironical tone. “Come, Harrington, acknowledge it all, man--all equally. Never stop half way, when a young--and such a young lady, summons you to surrender to her your truth, taste, and common sense. Gi’ her a’ the plea, or you’ll get na good of a woman’s hands.” “So, sir!--So, my lord, you are against me too, and you are mocking me too, I find. I humbly thank you, gentlemen,” cried Lady Anne, in a high tone of disdain; “from a colonel in the army, and a nobleman who has been on the continent, I might have expected more politeness. From a Cambridge scholar no wonder!” My mother laid down her netting in the middle of a row, and came to keep the peace. But it was too late; Lady Anne was deaf and blind with passion. She confessed she could not see of what use either of the universities were in this world, except to make bears and bores of young men.