For the life that was dead it had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze at it through microscopes.

Occasionally it would waken up to literature with a paper on Akenside.

In everything that didn't in the least matter some of these mild old gentlemen were genuinely learned.

Not that they hadn't read the great poets, even in the original Greek, Latin, and Italian.

Poets in dead and foreign languages were a form of fossils, and English poets--with that divine bloom upon them!--they had a way of fossilising by spectacles, so that they never read them alive.