BULLER.
Celebrated! Where is it?
TALBOYS.
Preface to Shakspeare—is idle, and frivolous, and false?
NORTH.
It is. He belies his own experience. He cannot make up his mind to admit the irrational thought of belief which you at once reject and accept. But exactly the half acceptance, and the half rejection, separates poetry from—prose.
TALBOYS.
That is, sir, the poetical from the prosaic.
NORTH.
Just so. It is the life and soul of all poetry—the lusus—the make-believe—the glamour and the gramarye. I do not know—gentlemen—I wish to be told, whether I am now throwing away words upon the setting up of a pyramid which was built by Cheops, and is only here and there crumbling a little, or whether the world requires that the position shall be formally argued and acknowledged. Johnson, as you reminded me, Talboys, did not admit it.