A thousand external circumstances, which it would require a volume to enumerate, must concur with a certain easy and strong excitability in the physical and mental frame; and that excitability called into action by the right sort of stimulants, to impart happy and vigorous action to the imagination. Milton affirmed, that his muse was most propitious in the spring. As far as I can judge, the season of reproduction, and the awakening of the slumbering powers of nature, in the aroma and brilliancy of vegetation and flowers, acts too voluptuously on the senses, to give the highest and best direction to the imagination. The Indian summer days of autumn, with the associated repose of nature, the broad and crimson disk of the sun enthroned in the dome of a misty sky, the clouds sleeping in the firmament, the gorgeous coloring of the forests, the flashing fall of the first leaves, and the not unpleasing sadness of the images, called up by the imperceptible decay of nature, and the stealthy approach of winter, seem to me most favorable to heavenly musing. A cloudless morning, a beautiful sun, the glittering brightness of the dew drops, the renovated freshness of nature, morning sounds, the mists rolling away from the path of the sun, a bland southwest breeze, good health, self-satisfaction, the recent reception of good news, and the right train of circumstances all concur to put this faculty into its happiest action. Every one is acquainted with the unsparing ridicule bestowed on Bayes, in Buckingham’s Rehearsal, for announcing, that he always took physic, before he wrote. Yet the dull coxcomb had reason and truth on his side. Mental action is more dependent upon corporeal, and the ethereal powers upon the right disposition of that organized clod, the body, than most are willing to acknowledge. Who has not felt, when first going abroad from severe sickness, the new aspects of nature, a fullness of heart, and the crowding of innumerable images upon the thoughts, which have no place in the mind, after a turtle feast or a full dinner? When the digestive powers are oppressed with morbid accumulation, the wheels of mental movement, as every one knows, move heavily. Students, orators, painters, poets, imaginative men must live as near famine as may be, and the most useful stimulants are coffee and tea. Every one has read, that Byron’s inspiration was gin. It may be, that the detestible combination of terebinthine and alcoholic excitement may have aroused from the mouldy and terrene dormitories of his brain the images of Don Juan, and the obscene, irreligious, anti-social, and fierce thoughts, that abound in his works. But I would hardly believe, on his own assertion, that he wrote the Prisoners of Children under such an influence. The muse of alcohol is accursed; and her influence is too corroding, dreggy, and adverse to life, to originate ideas worthy of being handed down in immortal verse. If