They resemble the soothsayers of old, who dealt in dark hints and doubtful oracles; and I should like to ask them the meaning of what no mortal but themselves, I should suppose, can fathom. There is Dr. Johnson, I have no curiosity, no strange uncertainty about him: he and Boswell together have pretty well let me into the secret of what passed through his mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently explicit: my friends, whose repose I should be tempted to disturb, (were it in my power) are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable. “And call up him who left half-told The story of Cambuscan bold.” ‘When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose-composition (the _Urn-burial_) I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it. Besides, who would not be curious to see the lineaments of a man who, having himself been twice married, wished that mankind were propagated like trees! As to Fulke Greville, he is like nothing but one of his own “Prologues spoken by the ghost of an old king of Ormus,” a truly formidable and inviting personage: his style is apocalyptical, cabalistical, a knot worthy of such an apparition to untie; and for the unravelling a passage or two, I would stand the brunt of an encounter with so portentous a commentator!’—‘I am afraid in that case,’ said A——, ‘that if the mystery were once cleared up, the merit might be lost;‘—and turning to me, whispered a friendly apprehension, that while B—— continued to admire these old crabbed authors, he would never become a popular writer. Dr. Donne was mentioned as a writer of the same period, with a very interesting countenance, whose history was singular, and whose meaning was often quite as _uncomeatable_, without a personal citation from the dead, as that of any of his contemporaries. The volume was produced; and while some one was expatiating on the exquisite simplicity and beauty of the portrait prefixed to the old edition, A—— got hold of the poetry, and exclaiming ‘What have we here?’ read the following:— ‘Here lies a She-Sun and a He-Moon there, She gives the best light to his sphere, Or each is both and all, and so They unto one another nothing owe.’ There was no resisting this, till B——, seizing the volume, turned to the beautiful ‘Lines to his Mistress,’ dissuading her from accompanying him abroad, and read them with suffused features and a faltering tongue.