The volume is a quaint collection of many things—original verses, extracts from books, and notes of sermons; and the reader can only wish that a few of the evenings spent with the Apostles might have been recorded within these marbled covers. But this one conversation has a charm peculiarly its own, and we will no longer keep the reader from entering the Hampstead room well known to the literary men of the day, where silently he may observe an old-world courtesy and ceremony belonging to a past age, while listening to a discourse only too seldom to be heard.] _C._ Is there anything stirring now in the world of letters, anything in the shape of poetry lately produced, for I see nothing of the sort, nor even a Review that is not a year old? _F._ No, Sir, at least I have heard no talk of any such thing; these continual burnings occupy all men’s thoughts and conversation. _C._ And what remedies are proposed? They talk I suppose of retrenchments, but what good can retrenchment do? Alas! revolutionary times are times of general demoralisation; what great men do they ever produce? What was produced by the late Revolutionary Spirit in France? There must be something uppermost to be sure in such disturbances; some military superiority, but what great—I mean truly great—man was produced? In England the same spirit was curbed in and worsted by the moral sense, afterwards there followed times of repose, and the Muses began to show themselves. But now what is going forward? The depravity of the spirit of the times is marked by the absence of poetry. For it is a great mistake to suppose that thought is not necessary for poetry; true, at the time of composition there is that starlight, a dim and holy twilight; but is not light necessary before? Poetry is the highest effort of the mind; all the powers are in a state of equilibrium and equally energetic, the knowledge of individual existence is forgotten, the man is out of himself and exists in all things, his eye in _a_ fine &c. There is no one perhaps who composes with more facility than your Uncle; but does it cost him nothing before? It is the result of long thought; and poetry as I have before observed must be the result of thought, and the want of thought in what is now called poetry is a bad sign of the times.