Dies Iræ

Will you allow me to enter my protest against the terms "extremely beautiful and magnificent," applied by your respectable correspondents to the *Dies Iræ*, which, I confess, I think not deserving any such praise either for its poetry or its piety. The first triplet is the best, though I am not sure that even the merit of that be not its *jingle*, in which King David and the Sybil are strangely enough brought together to testify of the day of judgment. Some of the triplets appear to me very poor, and hardly above macaronic Latin.