"I am pleased to find," he said, while we were talking about Byron, "that you preserve your muse chaste, and free from rank and corrupt passion. Lord Byron degraded poetry in that respect. Men's hearts are bad enough. Poetry should refine and purify their natures; not make them worse." I ventured the plea that Don Juan was descriptive, and that Shakspeare had also described bad passions in anatomising the human heart, which was one of the great vocations of the poet. "But there is always a moral lesson," he replied quickly, "in Shakspeare's pictures. You feel he is not stirring man's passions for the sake of awakening the brute in them: the pure and the virtuous are always presented in high contrast; but the other riots in corrupt pictures, evidently with the enjoyment of the corruption."