Sometimes he would have a company of such gentlemen as Messrs. Warrington, Honeyman, and Pendennis, when haply a literary conversation would ensue after dinner; and the merits of our present poets and writers would be discussed with the claret. Honeyman was well enough read in profane literature, especially of the lighter sort; and, I dare say, could have passed a satisfactory examination in Balzac, Dumas, and Paul de Kock himself, of all whose works our good host was entirely ignorant,—as indeed he was of graver books, and of earlier books, and of books in general—except those few which we have said formed his travelling library. He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him. He heard that Byron was no great poet, though a very clever man. He heard that there had been a wicked persecution against Mr. Pope’s memory and fame, and that it was time to reinstate him; that his favourite, Dr. Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English: that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael: and that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately published two volumes of verses, might take rank with the greatest poets of all. Doctor Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second order! Mr. Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr. Keats and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern poetic literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington delivered with a puff of tobacco-smoke: to which Mr. Honeyman blandly assented and Clive listened with pleasure? Such opinions were not of the Colonel’s time. He tried in vain to construe Oenone, and to make sense of Lamia. Ulysses he could understand; but what were these prodigious laudations bestowed on it? And that reverence for Mr. Wordsworth, what did it mean? Had he not written Peter Bell, and been turned into deserved ridicule by all the reviews? Was that dreary Excursion to be compared to Goldsmith’s Traveller, or Doctor Johnson’s Imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal? If the young men told the truth, where had been the truth in his own young days, and in what ignorance had our forefathers been brought up?—Mr. Addison was only an elegant essayist, and shallow trifler! All these opinions were openly uttered over the Colonel’s claret, as he and Mr. Binnie sate wondering at the speakers, who were knocking the gods of their youth about their ears. To Binnie the shock was not so great; the hard-headed Scotchman had read Hume in his college days, and sneered at some of the gods even at that early time. But with Newcome the admiration for the literature of the last century was an article of belief: and the incredulity of the young men seemed rank blasphemy. “You will be sneering at Shakspeare next,” he said: and was silenced, though not better pleased, when his youthful guests told him, that Doctor Goldsmith sneered at him too; that Dr.