blossom to purposes of great public utility. The aid of poetry has hitherto been but partially employed in the spread of a taste for Conveyancing, especially in its higher branches. Or where the Muse has shown herself, it has been but in the evanescent glimpses of a song. She has plumed her wings for no sustained flight. . . .

     “The power of poetry over the heart and impulses of man has been recognised by all writers from Aristotle down to Serjeant Talfourd. In dexterous hands it has been known to subvert a severe chastity by the insinuations of a holy flame, to clothe impurity in vestments ‘bright with something

     of an angel light,’ to exalt spleen into elevation of soul, and selfishness into a noble scorn of the world, and, with the ringing cadences of an enthusiastic style, to ennoble the vulgar and to sanctify the low. How much may be done, with an engine of such power, in increasing the numbers of ‘The Family’ may be conceived. The Muse of Faking, fair daughter of the herald Mercury, claims her place among ‘The Mystic Nine.’ Her language, erewhile slumbering in the pages of the Flash Dictionary, now lives upon the lips of all, even in the most fashionable circles. Ladies accost crossing-sweepers as ‘dubsmen’; whist-players are generally spoken of in gambling families as ‘

      dummy

     -hunters’; children in their nursery sports are accustomed to ‘nix their dolls’; and the all but universal summons to exertion of every description is ‘Fake away!’

     “‘Words are things,’ says Apollonius of Tyana. We cannot be long familiar with a symbol without becoming intimate with that which it expresses. Let the public mind, then, be in the habit of associating these and similar expressions with passages of poetical power, let the ideas they import be imbedded in their hearts and glorified in their imaginations, and the fairest results may with confidence be anticipated.”

   In song and sonnet and ballad these views were illustrated and enforced. They served

   the purpose of the ridicule which it was hoped might operate to cure people of the prevailing toleration for the romance of the slums and the thieves’ kitchen. Naturally parody was freely used. Wordsworth did not escape. His

     “Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour,”

   found its echo in

     “Turpin, thou shouldst be living at this hour,

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