Within a few days, however, I learnt that it had of late become very fashionable and genteel to appear half asleep, and that one could exhibit no better mark of superfine breeding than by occasionally in company setting one's rhomal organ in action.

I then ceased to wonder at the popularity, which I found nearly universal, of -- - 's poetry; for, certainly in order to make one's self appear sleepy in company, or occasionally to induce sleep, nothing could be more efficacious than a slight prelection of his poems.

So poor Byron, with his fire and emotion--to say nothing of his mouthings and coxcombry--was dethroned, as I prophesied he would be more than twenty years before, on the day of his funeral, though I had little idea that his humiliation would have been brought about by one, whose sole strength consists in setting people to sleep.

Well, all things are doomed to terminate in sleep.

Before that termination, however, I will venture to prophesy that people will become a little more awake--snoring and yawning be a little less in fashion--and poor Byron be once more reinstated on his throne, though his rival will always stand a good chance of being worshipped by those whose ruined nerves are insensible to the narcotic powers of opium and morphine..