The beautiful rebuke that looks surprise, The gentle vengeance of averted eyes; --which last line so pleased him that it occurs again in _The Farewell_ (Letter XXV of _The Heroine_). The shorter poem, like the longer, has the indescribable old-world charm of a pressed rose-leaf, an elegant tarnished mirror, a faded silken fan, a vanished mode. The secret of this sentimental type of beauty perhaps lies here, that the simplicity and shyness and ardour of youth are reduced, not by a conscious science, but by the timid rules of propriety and modesty, to the service of an all-prevailing coquetry. Ovid, as expounded by Mrs. Chapone or Miss Hannah More, gains something in the delicacy of his methods, and loses nothing of his empire: Ut quondam iuvenes, ita nunc, mea turba, puellae Inscribant spoliis: Naso magister erat. It must be said, however, that the author of _Woman, a Poem_ does not confine himself to the alluring graces. His best known and most quoted lines are written in praise of courage and fidelity: Not she denied her God with recreant tongue, Not she with traitrous kisses round him clung; She, while Apostles shrank, could danger brave, Last at his cross and earliest at his grave. If he were to survive in a single quotation, it is probably by these lines that the author, who spent much labour on the revision and polishing of his poem, would wish to be remembered. It may seem strange that the author of this romantic poem on Woman should have been so ready to parody the new school of prose romance. Miss Cherry Wilkinson, when she took the name of Cherubina, and commenced heroine, might certainly have found some useful hints for her behaviour in this earlier treatise. But the fact is that no parodist is successful who has not at some time fallen deeply under the spell of the literature that he parodies. Parody is, for the most part, a weak and clinging kind of tribute to the force of its original. Very perfect parodies, which catch the soul, as well as the form, of the models that they imitate, almost lose their identity and become a part of that which they were meant to ridicule. Feeble parodies, where poor matter, not strong enough to speak for itself, claims notice by the aid of a notorious tune, are even more conspicuously dependent on the vogue of their original. The art of a tailor is seen in the cut of a coat; to make a mechanical copy of it, substituting tartan or fustian for velvet, is what any Chinese slave can do. It is form in literature which is difficult to invent. When a poem or a story, by the individuality and novelty of its form, has caught the public taste, there are always some among its victims who are nothing if not critical. They cannot forget it, yet it does not content them. They think it narrow and partial in its conception; it does not mirror Nature exactly as they see her; in short, they have ideas of their own. These ideas perhaps have not vitality enough to create their own