“_Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit._”’ Nothing can well be more impracticable to a simile than the vague and complicated idea which is here embodied in one; yet how finely, how nobly it stands out, in natural grandeur, in royal state, with double barriers round it to answer for its identity, with ‘buttress, frieze, and coigne of ‘vantage’ for the imagination to ‘make its pendant bed and procreant cradle,’ till the idea is confounded with the object representing it—the wonder of a kingdom; and then how striking, how determined the descent, ‘at one fell swoop,’ to the ‘low, fat, Bedford level!’ Poetry would have been bound to maintain a certain decorum, a regular balance between these two ideas; sterling prose throws aside all such idle respect to appearances, and with its pen, like a sword, ‘sharp and sweet,’ lays open the naked truth! The poet’s Muse is like a mistress, whom we keep only while she is young and beautiful, _durante bene placito_; the Muse of prose is like a wife, whom we take during life, _for better for worse_. Burke’s execution, like that of all good prose, savours of the texture of what he describes, and his pen slides or drags over the ground of his subject, like the painter’s pencil. The most rigid fidelity and the most fanciful extravagance meet, and are reconciled in his pages. I never pass Windsor but I think of this passage in Burke, and hardly know to which I am indebted most for enriching my moral sense, that or the fine picturesque stanza, in Gray, ‘From Windsor’s heights the expanse below Of mead, of lawn, of wood survey,’ &c. I might mention that the so much admired description in one of the India speeches, of Hyder Ally’s army (I think it is) which ‘now hung like a cloud upon the mountain, and now burst upon the plain like a thunder bolt,’ would do equally well for poetry or prose. It is a bold and striking illustration of a naturally impressive object. This is not the case with the Abbe Sieyes’s far-famed ‘pigeon-holes,’ nor with the comparison of the Duke of Bedford to ‘the Leviathan, tumbling about his unwieldy bulk in the ocean of royal bounty.’ Nothing here saves the description but the force of the invective; the startling truth, the vehemence, the remoteness, the aptitude, the perfect peculiarity and coincidence of the allusion. No writer would ever have thought of it but himself; no reader can ever forget it. What is there in common, one might say, between a Peer of the Realm, and ‘that sea-beast,’ of those ‘Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream?’