68 REVIEWS. 



just said, as this was not the case with all, their safety, notwithstanding 

 the deficiency in the consistence of the felt, cannot be altogether attribu- 

 able to this precaution. On the whole, it must be an excellent substitute 

 for cork, particularly in " cases" where there is no moving about, and it 

 must, I suppose, judging from the price charged, as we are informed at 

 the railway stations, for "Groggon's Patent Asphalte Felt," namely, a penny 

 a square foot, if I remember aright, be vastly cheaper than cork — some 

 twentieth or fiftieth only of the price — and also laid down with much more 

 ease and expedition, as being in a single piece. I shall be obliged to any 

 of our readers who will give me the result of his experience on the sub- 

 ject, that I may "take the benefit of the act." — P. O. Morris, Nunburn- 

 holme Rectory, February 3rd., 1858. 



toirtns. 



The Poetical Works of Thomas Aird. One Volume. A New Edition. 

 William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London. 



However much it may lower me in the opinion — I own I am sur- 

 prised to say that I have no doubt it must be many of — my readers, I 

 have to acknowledge, as I did in a review of a poem in a former number, 

 that I am not in the general way fond of poetry, viz., the writings of 

 so-called poets. With some exceptions, such as those mentioned before, 

 "Percy's Reliques," Walter Scott, and Gray, to which I would add a few 

 of the Oxford Prize Poems, Eeginald Heber's "Palestine" for example, I 

 think it is, for the most part, good prose, or bad as the case may be, the 

 good spoiled, or the bad made worse. 



Why should language in poetry, any more than in prose, be given only 

 to conceal the thoughts? yet who can read (read, indeed! who can pos- 

 sibly have patience to read) Tennyson, to say nothing of some of the 

 verses of Keble, or those of Longfellow, and have the least notion, without 

 pondering them over like the most difficult chorus of the hardest of the 

 Greek Plays, what on earth the writer means? This is not indeed much 

 to be wondered at, inasmuch as we must often shrewdly guess that the 

 writer did not know himself, his mind as well as his eye having been 

 manifestly all the while "in a fine frenzy rolling." 



There is a story told somewhere of a lawyer who used to write a 

 shocking bad hand, or rather three bad ones, one which only his clerk 

 could read after he had written it, another which only he himself could 

 read afterwards, and a third which neither he nor his clerk could make 

 head or tail of. In the predicament of this last category it is to me per- 

 fectly clear that most of our modern poets are. Yet surely if Euclid 



