The student will, at some time or another, have suffered strong emotions. He will have desired to give them metrical form. He will have done so--and commonly he will have gone no further. I have before as I write a verse, the opening of one of the most unsuccessful poems ever written. It runs:-- “I am not as my fathers were, I cannot pass from sleep to sleep, Or live content to drink the deep Contentment of the common air.” This is very bad. It is bad because it proceeded from a deep emotion only, and shot out untrammelled. It has no connection with verse as an art, and yet that art lies open for any young man who will be patient and humble, and who will _learn_. His first business is to decide at once between the only two styles possible in manufactured verse, the Obscure and the Prattling. I say “the _only_ two styles” because I don’t think you can tackle the Grandiose, and I am quite certain you couldn’t manage the Satiric. I know a young man in Red Lion Square who can do the Grandiose very well, and I am going to boom him when I think the time has come; but the Student-in-Ordinary cannot do it, so he may put it out of his head. I will take the Simple or Prattling style first. Choose a subject from out of doors, first because it is the fashion, and secondly because you can go and observe it closely. For you must know that manufactured verse is very like drawing, and in both arts you have to take a model and be careful of details. Let us take (_e.g._) a Pimpernel. A Pimpernel is quite easy to write about; it has remarkable habits, it is not gross or common. It would be much harder to write about grass, for instance, or parsley. First you write down anything that occurs to you, like this:-- “Pretty little Pimpernel, May I learn to love you well?” You continue on the style of “Twinkle, twinkle.” “Hiding in the mossy shade, Like a lamp of ¯˘ made, Or a gem by fairies dropt In their ...” and there you stick, just as you had got into the style of the “L’Allegro.” I have no space or leisure to give the student the full treatment of so great a subject, how he would drag in the closing and opening of the flower, and how (skilfully avoiding the word “dell”) he would end his ten or fifteen lines by a repetition of the first (an essential feature of the Prattling style). I will confine myself to showing him what may be made of these ridiculous six lines. The first has an obvious fault. It runs too quickly, and one falls all over it. We will keep “Little” and put it first, so one might write “Little Purple Pimpernel.” But even that won’t do, though the alliteration is well enough. What change can we make?