wine-party, who, alone with his ink-pot, was for ever enacting the
part of the unheeded poet, complaining of the hard hearts and
tuneless ears of his generation. I went into his room once, and
found him with the tears running down his face, a pot of stout half
empty on the table, and his den all but opaque with tobacco-smoke,
reciting, with sobs--I had repeated the lines so often before they
ceased to amuse me, that I can never forget them--

'Heard'st thou a quiver and clang?
In thy sleep did it make thee start?
'Twas a chord in twain that sprang--
But the lyre-shell was my heart.'

He took a pull at the stout, laid his head on the table, and sobbed
like a locomotive."

"But it's not very bad--not bad at all, so far as I see," said
Helen, who had a woman's weakness for the side attacked, in addition
to a human partiality for fair play.

"No, not bad at all--for absolute nonsense," said Bascombe.

"He had been reading Heine," said Wingfold.

"And burlesquing him," returned Bascombe. "Fancy hearing one of the
fellow's heart-strings crack, and taking it for a string of his
fiddle in the press! By the way, what are the heart-strings? Have
they any anatomical synonym? But I have no doubt it was good
poetry."