Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/111

 Rh. But could any dearth of fiction persuade us now to read the "Botanic Garden"? Were we shipwrecked in company with the "Triumphs of Temper," would we ever finish the first canto? Novels stood on every English book-shelf when Fox read "Madoc" aloud at night to his friends, and they stayed up, so he says, an hour after their bedtime to hear it. Could that miracle be worked to-day? Sir Walter Scott, with indestructible amiability, reread "Madoc" to please Miss Seward, who, having "steeped" her own eyes "in transports of tears and sympathy," wrote to him that it carried "a master-key to every bosom which common good sense and anything resembling a human heart inhabit." Scott, unwilling to resign all pretensions to a human heart, tried hard to share the Swan's emotions, and failed. "I cannot feel quite the interest I would like to do," he patiently confessed.

If Southey's poems were not read as Scott's and Moore's and Byron's were read (give us another Byron, and we will read him with forty thousand novels knocking at our doors!); if they were not paid for out of the miraculous