Dr. Paul Hiffernan, a celebrated wit in the time of Johnson, once went to call on his friend Foote, or, as he was justly called, "the English Aristophanes," and, without inquiring for his room, ran precipitately up into the garret. Foote, who at that time resided in a less aërial situation, called after him. "'Tis no use," replied Hiffernan, "to shew me your room; who ever thought of asking, when every one knows that there never yet was a poet without his garret."

Unfortunately, these celebrated abodes of genius, these upper stories, like all other old and dull stories, are now waxing stale and out of fashion. Authors are no longer measured by their leanness, poets are no longer skinny, and Parnassus is no longer a bleak, desolate, and unprofitable clime.

PECULIAR HABITS OF POETS.

YOUNG wrote his "Night Thoughts" with a scull, and a candle in it, before him. His own scull was luckily in the room, or very little aid would have been yielded by the other.

It is said, that DRYDEN was always cupped

and physicked, previous to a grand effort at tragedy.

BEMBO had a desk of forty divisions, through which his sonnets passed in succession, before they were published; and at each transition, they received correction.

MILTON used to sit leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it. He frequently composed lying in bed in the morning; but when he could not sleep, and lay awake whole nights, not one verse could he make; at other times, flowed easy his unpremeditated lines, with a certain impetus and oestrum, as himself used to believe. Then, whatever the hour, he rang for his daughter to commit them to paper. He would sometimes dictate forty lines in a breath, and then reduce them to half the number. These may appear trifles; but such trifles assume a sort of greatness, when related of what is great.

THUANUS tells us, that Tasso was frequently seized with violent fits of distraction; which yet did not prevent his writing excellent verses.

LUCRETIUS, also, "running distracted by drinking a love potion, wrote some books during his lucid intervals.”—Chron. Eusebii.

IT has been said, that it was not but by strong application and violent labour, that MALHERBE produced his divine poetical performances. His Muse might have been compared with some women, who suffer the pangs of childbearing for seven or eight days successively; and since his pangs were longer and more violent than those to which Balzac was subject in the like cases, they must have been horrible. Consider the following passage in Balzac's Letters to Conrart; Letter the eleventh : "At last it is finished; I mean the discourse which I mentioned to you in my last letter, and which is one of the five that I promised you. It has fatigued, it has exhausted me, it has made me curse the trade a dozen times. Though you may tell me, this is still to be more easily satisfied than was that honest man, whom I so often quote to you. He blotted half a ream of paper in making and retrenching one single stanza. If you are curious to know which stanza it was, it begins with

'Comme en cueillant une guirlande,

L'homme est d'autant plus travaillé.'

"Good God! what pains do we take in such trifles! trifles moral and political, in French and in Latin, in prose and in verse?" This good man was Malherbe, for we find the lines in his Poesies, liv. 4.

Balzac also tells us, that Malherbe, the best French poet of his time, "said the most genteel things in the world; but he did not say them with a good grace, and he was the worst reciter of his age. He spoilt his fine verses in reading them; besides, that one could scarce hear him for the impediment in his speech and the lowness of his voice. He spit at least six times in reciting a stanza of four lines; and it was this which caused the Cavalier Marin to say of him, that he had never seen so moist a man, or so dry a poet."

POETRY AND POETS.

THE second thoughts of poets are not unworthy of notice. POPE has this verse in his Essay on Man:"

Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man,
A mighty maze! but not without a plan."

But in the first edition it was, "A mighty maze without a plan!" GRAY's second thoughts seem to be better than the first, for he displays the same contradiction. In the first edition of his "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat," it was printed, "What cat's a foe to fish?" when the strongest proof of it is in this very ode. It was altered to "What cat's averse to fish?" Such inadvertencies, however, though they may be good-humouredly pointed out, will take place even amongst the greatest geniuses.

"You ought not to write verses," said King George II., who had little taste, to Lord Hervey, "'tis beneath your rank: leave such work to little Mr. Pope; it is his trade!" On the other hand, Woolaston's "Religion of Nature Delineated" even became a fashionable book at Court, for the Queen read it.

A HAPPY thought, which may please the Court, is better for a poet, than all his genius, learning, or even integrity. Dr. DONNE, in the 168th page of his "Pseudo Martyr," holds, that when men congregate to form the body of civil society, then it is that the soul of society, So