At first, I received no answer to what I said--the company merely surveying me with a kind of sleepy stare.

At length a lady, about the age of forty, with a large wart on her face, observed, in a drawling tone, "That she had not read Byron--at least, since her girlhood--and then only a few passages; but that the impression on her mind was, that his writings were of a highly objectionable character." "I also read a little of him in my boyhood," said a gentleman about sixty, but who evidently, from his dress and demeanour, wished to appear about thirty, "but I highly disapproved of him; for, notwithstanding he was a nobleman, he is frequently very coarse, and very fond of raising emotion.

Now emotion is what I dislike;" drawling out the last syllable of the word dislike.

"There is only one poet for me--the divine--" and then he mentioned a name which I had only once heard, and afterwards quite forgotten; the same mentioned by the snorer in the field.

"Ah! there is no one like him!" murmured some more of the company; "the poet of nature--of nature without its vulgarity." I wished very much to ask these people whether they were ever bad sleepers, and whether they had read the poet, so called, from a desire of being set to sleep.