Now I am sure that Pope is just the kind of poet whose verses you would read magnificently.

Shall we explore the bookcase together ?" Now if there is any manner of beguiling an idle afternoon, which seems to me most delightful, it is by the exploration of old bookcases; and when that delight can be shared by the woman one fondly loves, the pleasure thereof must be of course multiplied to an indefinite amount.
So Charlotte and I set to work immediately to ransack the lower shelves of the old-fashioned mahogany bookcase, which contained the entire library of the Mercer household.
I am bound to admit that we did not light upon many volumes of thrilling interest.

The verses of Cowper, like those of Southey, have always appeared to me to have only one fault--there are too many of them.

One shrinks appalled from that thick closely-printed volume of morality cut into lengths of ten feet; and beyond the few well-worn quotations in daily use, I am fain to confess that I am almost a stranger to the bard of Olney.
Half a dozen odd volumes of the _Gentleman's Magazine_, three or four of the _Annual Register_, a neatly-bound edition of _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_ in twelve volumes, Law's _Holy Call to a Serious Life_, _Paradise Lost_, _Joseph Andrews_, _Hervey's Meditations_, and _Gulliver's Travels_, formed the varied contents of the principal shelves.

Above, there were shabbily-bound volumes and unbound pamphlets.