THE POET'S FANCY. 53 



shadow forth its downfall from inherent gravity. The fragment 

 of Cork butter seemed augmented to a mountain, from whence 

 streams were slowly trickling on the dishonoured page, that 

 page,, now an enormous grease-illuminated scroll, printed in 

 gigantic characters which all who ran might read. And in 

 proportion to the fly-leaf, the Ply itself floated a swollen corpse 

 in a cup large enough to drown its destroyer. And see, 

 swollen as he is and hideous, that monster Ply is coining back 

 to life ! He struggles to the edge of the lacteal flood, lifts 

 above it his large hairy head, made up of dull red eyes, stretches 

 forth his elephantine trunk, growing long, and long, and 

 longer, raises his thin black arms and stands a giant on the 

 edge of the milky pool. Then flapping the drops in a shower 

 from his dripping pinions, he raises a buz deep, deafening as 

 of a thousand buzzes all in one, and darting forward, pounces 

 right upon the Poet's heaving heart. 



One day, towards the end of the same August, whose first 

 was made, as we have just commemorated, a big black-letter 

 day in our Poet's calendar, he was called on, in the midst of 



a/ 



his heaviness, to furnish something light, just to puff out what 

 would else have been a slender number of the Milliner's 

 Magazine. In the same parlour, under much such a heavy sky, 

 before him the same sorry equipage for tea, beside him a like 

 bit of melting butter, nothing would have been wanted, but 



