valuable work on _Æsthetics_ (fortunately translated into English), also takes a broad conception of the term poetry. He says that it would be absurd to deny Molière's _L'Avare_ is poetry because it is in prose, for poetical, creative imagination and personal emotions are at work here. He states that there was poetry in the story of Don Juan before Corneille put it in verse. Versification, he urges, does not constitute poetry. He sees that verse would not have improved such prose poems as _Paul and Virginia_, _La Mare au Diable_, or _L'Oiseau_ (Michelet), and he places in the front rank of poetry passages from Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet (no doubt referring to some of the famous funeral orations) and Mirabeau. He also says it is impossible to refuse to see poetic character in the novel, for this deals with the creation of character and the portrayal of passions.

I do not wish to go into the prose poetry written by other nations, for every literature is full of it. There is a growing tendency in England to encourage prose poetry. De Quincey having made a special plea for impassioned prose is looked upon as the father of it, though there was prose poetry in English literature from the earliest times; Malory, Sidney, Sir Thomas Browne, Raleigh, Drummond, Milton, Bunyan, Taylor and Fuller were great prose poets. John Stuart Mill and Lord Beaconsfield both recognized the utterly negligible role of metre in determining the nature of poetry. In an early essay, originally published before he was thirty and collected with another under the title _Poetry and Its Varieties_, Mill gives us his definition of poetry. Guided by a statement of the author of the _Corn Law Rhymes_, Ebenezer Elliot, that poetry is impassioned truth, and by another definition from Blackwood's, that poetry is "man's thought tinged by his feelings," he says, "Every truth which a human being can enunciate, every thought, even every outward impression, which can enter into his consciousness, may become poetry when shown through any impassioned medium, when invested with the coloring of joy, or grief, or pity, or affection, or admiration, or reverence, or awe, or even hatred, or terror: and, unless so colored, nothing, be it as interesting as it may, is poetry." There is nothing said in this definition about rhythm or metre, and indeed Mill regarded as the vulgarest of all any definition of poetry which confounds it with metrical composition.

An idea emotionally treated becomes poetry whether in prose or verse, whether rhythmical or not. Mill understood that, yet he erred when he assigned a minor role to the emotions excited by the incidents in prose fiction, though it is true that the 

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