"No, I suppose not," said Mr. Neville, "any more than they would think of seeing hay-makers in their verandas, or a sheep-shearing in their drawings-rooms. But 'the children of darkness are wiser in their generation than the children of light,' and he who sings of nothing but lawless crimes, and sated vices, does wisely to address his song to the inhabitants of an overgrown and luxurious metropolis." "Yes, yes; he is sure enough of sympathy, plenty of dancing daffodils there,--only of rather an opposite species. What do you say, Miss Neville, do you like the titled Bard?" "Quite well enough, as a poet, to wish he had made choice of better subjects. Edward Longcroft says he has in him a fragment of almost every other poet's distinguishing excellence, but unfortunately his own genius is only a fragment itself, and, therefore, he produces nothing but fragments after all." "Very wise in Mr. Longcroft--I dare say he could prove every thing he says most mathematically; but I fancy he will find the generality of his acquaintance admire diamond sparks more than brick-bats--though one is only a part, and the other a whole." "Very good! very good!" said Mr. Neville, "but who have we here?" he added, as he looked towards the little gate. "Ah ha! here he is himself--now we can have diamond sparks versus brick-bats, as long as you like, and see who has the better of the argument." A matter-of-fact-man is well portrayed in the following: "Henry Barton," said she to herself, "is a good creature, as ever was born; and he has great merit, too, in cultivating his mind so sedulously, surrounded as he is only by the clodpoles his father has brought him up amongst. But, after all, he is such a mere matter-of-fact-man, that one soon tires of him--he tells one an anecdote just as he reads it, and there's an end of it. And then he moralizes, too, in such a common-place way, and wonders how the Romans could degenerate so as to suffer themselves to be conquered by the Goths, and finds out that it was an abominable thing in Henry VIII to cut off his wives' heads, and not much better in Queen Elizabeth to sign Essex's death warrant. There is no play of imagination about him--no whim, no wit--he would as soon think of launching a man of war, as maintaining a paradox." The subjoined sentiment is beautifully expressed: "Ah, is there any happiness like that of the affections! from the soul-absorbing influence of individual love, through all the endearing gradations of natural ties, and selected friends, down to the generalized claims of our fellow-creatures: it will ever be found that all our real enjoyments are solid only as the feelings of the heart are connected with them; and long after the traces of external objects may be effaced from the memory, the kindly sentiments and participated feelings, with which they may have been connected, remain indelible in the interior recesses of the breast, which they fill with a sweet indistinctness of recollected enjoyment."