prose, it would also be significant, then we are enchanted. I can remember, in my early childhood, that I had delighted myself for a long time with the agreeable sound of verse before I made the discovery that it all also contained meaning and thoughts. Accordingly there is also, in all languages, a mere doggerel poetry almost entirely devoid of meaning. Davis, the Sinologist, in the preface to his translation of the “_Laou‐ sang‐urh_,” or “_An Heir in Old Age_” (_London, 1817_), observes that the Chinese dramas partly consist of verses which are sung, and adds: “The meaning of them is often obscure, and, according to the statements of the Chinese themselves, the end of these verses is especially to flatter the ear, and the sense is neglected, and even entirely sacrificed to the harmony.” Who is not reminded here of the choruses of many Greek tragedies which are often so hard to make out? The sign by which one most immediately recognises the genuine poet, both of the higher and lower species, is the unforced nature of his rhymes. They have appeared of themselves as if by divine arrangement; his thoughts come to him already in rhyme. The homely, prosaic man on the contrary, seeks the rhyme for the thought; the bungler seeks the thought for the rhyme. Very often one can find out from a couple of rhymed verses which of the two had the thought and which had the rhyme as its father. The art consists in concealing the latter, so that such lines may not appear almost as mere stuffed out _boutsrimés_.