with the finale to Peace and Quiet, close allied to Pleasure--all these and all the rest of the 150 lines or so of the poem have their own appropriate agreeableness. And it will be very dangerous for anyone to try the usual sneer at eighteenth-century convention, lest haply he be thought to be blinded or hoodwinked by conventions of another sort. He has, for instance, been taught to think "wanton Zephyr" very bad. But has he quite realised the simplicity and perfection with which the single word "sings" distinctively characterises the rush of the wind aloft, and the next line brings before the mind's senses the flowers and crops and woods, from which the "perfume" is derived below? Is "unbounded," in the particular and yet fully legitimate sense, quite what Edmond de Goncourt used disdainfully to call "everybody's epithet" for the apparently limitless freedom of the birds' flight? Without quoting the whole piece it would be impossible to show the singular uniformity of pictorial and musical skill which distinguishes it; but this can be left, with complete security of mind, to anyone who gives it an impartial reading to discover for himself. Even the impartial reader is not recommended to proceed from _Grongar Hill_ to _The Ruins of Rome_, as the poet in this latter piece most unwisely invites him to do--still less to _The Fleece_. But no attempt is being made here to prove that the eighteenth century never produced bad poetry: one merely endeavours to point out that it sometimes produced good. The _Prayer for Indifference_ is much less varied in kind, and much more limited in degree, of attraction, but it is perhaps subtler. The personal application of it can escape no reader of Fanny Burney's Diaries, but is not necessary to appreciation. The idea is that of an appeal to Oberon for a "balm" slightly different from that which plays so important a part in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_--a spell causing neither love nor hate, but only indifference. The metre is ordinary ballad or common measure; the language not very different from the ordinary poetic diction of the time. You are not, as in _Grongar Hill_, made to believe that you are not in the eighteenth century at all, or, if at all, as far from its usual and central ways and thoughts as Grongar itself was and is from London. But, by a quaint and pleasing paradox, the suppliant infuses into her prayer qualities which were the very opposite of that which she prays for, and which in a certain sense might be said to be the quality of the century itself at least on the common estimate. Indifference--in the sense of abstinence from enthusiasm--certainly _was_ affected by many, and positively approved by some, in those days. But when the lady says: I ask no kind return in love, No tempting charm to please-- Far from the heart such gifts remove That sighs for peace and ease,