ABSTRACT
To read Dryden, Pope, &c., you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure time, and discover the time of each word by the sense of passion. 1 would ask no surer test of a Scotchman's substratum (for the turf-cover of pretension they all have) than to make him read Donne's satires aloud. If he made manly metre of them and yet strict metre, then,-why, then he wasn't a Scotchman, or his soul was geographically slandered by his body's first appearing there.
