Who models his deportment as may best Sometimes a sprightly wit, and tale well told, Without much grace, or weight, or art, will hold A longer empire o'er the public mind Than sounding trifles, empty, though refined. Unhappy Greece! thy sons of ancient days The Muse may celebrate with perfect praise, Whose generous children narrow'd not their hearts With commerce, given alone to arms and arts. Our boys (save those whom public schools compel To "long and short" before they're taught to spell) From frugal fathers soon imbibe by rote, "A penny saved, my lad, 's a penny got." Babe of a city birth! from sixpence take The third, how much will the remainder make?— "A groat."-"Ah, bravo! Dick hath done the sum! He'll swell my fifty thousand to a plum." They whose young souls receive this rust betimes, Tis clear, are fit for any thing but rhymes; And Locke will tell you, that the father's right Who hides all verses from his children's sight; For poets, says this sage, (1) and many more, Make sad mechanics with their lyric lore; And Delphi now, however rich of old, Discovers little silver, and less gold, Because Parnassus, though a mount divine, Is poor as Irus, (2) or an Irish mine.(3) Quod sit conscripti, quod judicis officium, quæ Respicere exemplar vitæ morumque jubebo Uncia, quid superet? poteras dixisse, "Triens."-Eu! (1) I have not the original by me, but the Italian translation runs as follows:- E una cosa a mio credere molto stravagante, che un padre desideri, o permetta, che suo figlicolo coltivi e perfezioni questo talento." A little further on: Si trovano di rado nel Parnaso le miniere d'oro e ď argento." Educazione dei Fanciulli del Signor Locke.—[“If the child have a poetic vein, it is to me the strangest thing in the world, that the father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved."-" It is very seldom seen, that any one discovers mines of gold or silver on Parnassus."-L. E.] (2) "Iro pauperior:" this is the same beggar who boxed with Ulysses for a pound of kid's fry, which he lost, and balf a dozen teeth besides.-See Odyssey, b. 18. Two objects always should the poet move, Or one or both,-to please or to improve. Whate'er you teach, be brief, if you design For our remembrance your didactic line; Redundance places memory on the rack, For brains may be o'erloaded, like the back. Fiction does best when taught to look like truth, And fairy fables bubble none but youth: Expect no credit for too-wondrous tales, Since Jonas only springs alive from whales! Young men with aught but elegance dispense; To end at once:-that bard for all is fit His book, with Longman's liberal aid, shall pass But every thing has faults, nor is 't unknown That harps and fiddles often lose their tone, And wayward voices, at their owner's call, With all his best endeavours, only squall; Dogs blink their covey, flints withhold the spark, (4) And double-barrels (damn them!) miss their mark. (5) Where frequent beauties strike the reader's view, We must not quarrel for a blot or two; But pardon equally to books or men, The slips of human nature, and the pen. Yet if an author, spite of foe or friend, Despises all advice too much to mend, Quidquid præcipies, esto brevis: ut cito dicta Centuria seniorum agitant experția frugis: Nec semper feriet quodcunque minabitur arcus. (3) The Irish gold-mine of Wicklow, which yields just ore enough to swear by, or gild a bad guinea. (4) "This couplet is amusingly characteristic of that mixture of fun and bitterness with which their author sometimes spoke in conversation; so much so, that those who knew him might almost fancy they hear him utter the words." Moore.-L. E. (5) As Mr. Pope took the liberty of damning Homer, to whom he was under great obligations-" And Homer (damn him!) calls"-it may be presumed that any body or any thing may be damned in verse by poetical license; and, in case of accident, I beg leave to plead so illustrious a precedent. But ever twangs the same discordant string, As pictures, so shall poems be; some stand Parnassian pilgrims! ye whom chance, or choice, Hath led to listen to the Muse's voice, Ridetur, cbordà qui semper oberrat eâdem: Ut pictura poesis; erit, quæ, si propius stes, Te capiet magis; et quædam, si longius abstes: Hæc amat obscurum; volet hæc sub luce videri, Judicis argutum quæ non formidat acumen : (1) For the story of Billy Havard's tragedy, see Davies's Life of Garrick. I believe it is Regulus, or Charles the First. The moment it was known to be his the theatre thinned, and the bookseller refused to give the customary sum for the copyright." Havard," says Davies, "was reduced to great straits, and, in order to retrieve his affairs, the story of Charles the First was proposed to him as a proper subject to engage the public attention. Havard's desire of ease was known to be superior to his thirst for fame or money; and Giffard, the manager, insisted upon the power of locking him up till the work was finished. To this he consented; and Giffard actually turned the key upon him, and let him out at his pleasure, till the play was completed. It was acted with great emolument to the manager, and some degree of reputation, as well as gain, to the author. It drew large crowds to the theatre; curiosity was excited with respect to the author: that was a secret to be kept from the people; but Havard's love of fame would not suffer it to be concealed longer than the tenth or twelfth night of acting the play. The moment Havard put on the sword and tiewig, the genteel dress of the times, and professed himself to be the writer of Charles the First, the audiences were thinned, and the bookseller refused to give the usual sum of a hundred pounds for the copyright."-L. E.] (2) Here, in the original MS., we find the following couplet and note: "Though what gods, men, and columns' interdict, The Devil and Jeffrey pardon-in a Pict. *—L. E. (3) To the Eclectic or Christian Reviewers I have to return thanks for the fervour of that charity which, in 1809, induced them to express a hope that a thing then published "The Devil and Jeffrey are here placed antithetically to gods and men, such being their usual position, and their due one-according to the facetious saying, If God won't take you, the Devil must;' and I am sure no one durst object to his taking the poetry which, rejected by Horace, is accepted by Jeffrey. That these gentlemen are in some cases kinder,-the one to countrymen, and the other from his odd propensity to prefer evil to good,-than the 'gods, men, and columns' of Horace, may be seen by a reference to the review of Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming; and in No. 31 of the Edinburgh Review (given to me the other day by the captain of an English frigate off Salamis), there is a similar concession to the mediocrity of Jamie Grahame's British Georgies. It is fortunate for Campbell, that his fame neither depends on his last poem, nor the puff of the Edinburgh Review. The catalogues of our English are also less fastidious than the pillars of the Roman librarians.-A word more with the author of Gertrude of Wyoming. At the end of a poem, and even of a couplet, we have generally that unmeaning thing we call a thought; so Mr. Campbell concludes with a thought in such a manner as to fulfil the whole of Pope's prescription, and be as unmeaning' as the best of his brethren: 'Because I may not stain with grief Receive this counsel, and be timely wise; Few reach the summit which before you lies. In these plain common sense will travel far; No medium knows; you must be last or first; Are damn'd alike by gods, and men, and columns.(2) Again, my Jeffrey!-as that sound inspires, How wakes my bosom to its wonted fires! Fires, such as gentle Caledonians feel When Southrons writhe upon their critic wheel; Or mild Eclectics, (3) when some, worse than Turks, Would rob poor Faith to decorate "good works." Hæc placuit semel; hæc decies repetita placebit. by me might lead to certain consequences, which, although natural enough, surely came but rashly from reverend lips. I refer them to their own pages, where they congratulated themselves on the prospect of a tilt between Mr. Jeffrey and myself, from which some great good was to accrue, provided one or both were knocked on the head. Having survived two years and a half those Elegies which they were kindly preparing to review, I have no peculiar guste to give them "so joyful a trouble," except, indeed, “upon compulsion, Hal;" but if, as David says in the Rivals, it should come to "bloody sword and gun fighting," we "won't run, will we, Sir Lucius?" I do not know what I had done to these Eclectic gentlemen: my works are their lawful perquisite, to be hewn in pieces like Agag, if it seem meet unto them: but why they should be in such a hurry to kill off their author, I am ignorant. "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong: " and now, as these Christians have "smote me on one cheek," I hold them up the other; and, in return for their good wishes, give them an opportunity of repeating them. Had any other set of men expressed such sentiments, I should have smiled, and left them to the "recording angel;" but from the pharisees of Christianity decency might be expected. I can assure these brethren, that, publican and sinner as I am, I would not have treated "mine enemy's dog thus." To show them the superiority of my brotherly love, if ever the Reverend Messrs. Simeon or Kamsden should be engaged in such a conflict as that in which they requested me to fall, I hope they may escape with being "winged" only, and that Heaviside may be at hand to extract the ball.-[The following is the charitable passage in the Eclectic Review of which Lord Byron speaks:-"If the noble lord and the learned adWhen I was in the fifth form, I carried to my master the translation of a chorus in Prometheus,† wherein was a pestilent expression about 'staining a voice,' which met with no quarter. Little did I think that Mr. Campbell would have adopted my fifth form 'sublime-at least in so conspicuous a situation. 'Sorrow' has been 'dry' (in proverbs), and wet' (in sonnets), this many a day; and now it 'stains, and stains a sound, of all feasible things! To be sure, death-songs might have been stained with that same grief to very good purpose, if Outalissi had clapped down his stanzas on wholesome paper for the Edinburgh Evening Post, or any other given hyperborean gazette; or if the said Outalissi had been troubled with the slightest second sight of his own notes embodied on the last proof of an overcharged quarto: but as he is supposed to have been an improvisatore on this occasion, and probably to the last tune he ever chanted in this world, it would have done him no diacredit to have made his exit with a mouthful of common sense. Talking of staining' (as Caleb Quotem says) puts me in mind' of a certain couplet, which Mr. Campbell will find in a writer for whom he, and his school, have no small contempt : 'E'en copious Dryden wanted, or forgot, The last and greatest art-the art to blot!”—L. E. Such are the genial feelings thou canst claim— A muse and heart by choice so wholly thine? No jest on "minors," quibbles on a name, (2) Thy rhymes are vain; thy Jeffrey then forego, As if at table some discordant dish Should shock our optics, such as frogs for fish; Ut gratas inter mensas symphonia discors, vocate have the courage requisite to sustain their mutual insults, we shall probably soon hear the explosions of another kind of paper-war, after the fashion of the ever-memorable duel which the latter is said to have fought, or seemed to fight, with 'Little Moore.' We confess there is sufficient provocation, if not in the critique, at least in the satire, to urge a man of honour' to defy his assailant to artal combat. Of this we shall no doubt hear more in due Time-LE (1) Alas! I cannot strike at wretched kernes." Macbeth. -L. E (2) See the memorable critique of the Edinburgh Review, on Hours of Idleness.-L. E. *Invenies alium, si te hic fastidit, Alexin.” Lord Byron's taste for boxing brought him acquainted, at an early period, with this distinguished, and, it is not too much to say, respected professor of the art; for whom, throughout life, he continued to entertain a sincere regard. in a note to the eleventh canto of Don Juan, he calls him "his old friend, and corporeal pastor and master."-L. E. (5) Mr. Southey has lately tied another canister to his tail in the Curse of Kehama, maugre the neglect of Madoc, etc, and has in one instance had a wonderful effect. A literary friend of mine, walking out one lovely evening last summer, on the eleventh bridge of the Paddington canal, was alarmed by the cry of "one in jeopardy:" he rushed along, collected a body of Irish haymakers (supping on batter-milk in an adjacent paddock), procured three rakes, se eel-spear, and a landing-net, and at last (horresco referens!) pulled cat-his own publisher. The unfortunate As oil in lieu of butter men decry, Who shoot not flying rarely touch a gun: Will he who swims not to the river run? And men unpractised in exchanging knocks Must go to Jackson (4) ere they dare to box. Whate'er the weapon, cudgel, fist, or foil, None reach expertness without years of toil; But fifty dunces can, with perfect ease, Tag twenty thousand couplets, when they please. Why not?-shall I, thus qualified to sit For rotten boroughs, never show my wit? Shall I, whose fathers with the quorum sate, And lived in freedom on a fair estate; Who left me heir, with stables, kennels, packs, To all their income, and to-twice its tax; Whose form and pedigree have scarce a fault, Shall I, I say, suppress my Attic salt? man was gone for ever, and so was a large quarto wherewith he had taken the leap, which proved, on inquiry, to have been Mr. Southey's last work. Its "alacrity of sinking" was so great, that it has never since been heard of; though some maintain that it is at this moment concealed at Alderman Birch's pastry premises, Cornhill. Be this as it may, the coroner's inquest brought in a verdict of "Felo de bibliopola" against a "quarto unknown;" and circum. stantial evidence being since strong against the Curse of Kehama (of which the above words are an exact description), it will be tried by its peers next sessions, in Grubstreet-Arthur, Alfred, Davideis, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, Exodus, Exodia, Epigoniad, Calvary, Fall of Cambria, Siege of Acre, Don Roderick, and Tom Thumb the Great, are the names of the twelve jurors. The judges are Pye, Bowles, and the bellman of St. Sepulchre's. The same advocates, pro and con, will be employed as are now engaged in Sir F. Burdett's celebrated cause in the Scotch courts, The public anxiously await the result, and all live publishers will be subpoenaed as witnesses. But Mr. Southey has published the Curse of Kehama,—an inviting title to quibblers. By the by, it is a good deal beneath Scott and Campbell, and not much above Southey, to allow the booby Ballantyne to entitle them, in the Edinburgh Annual Register (of which, by the by, Southey is editor) "the grand poetical triumvi. rate of the day." But, on second thoughts, it can be no great degree of praise to be the one-eyed leaders of the blind, though they might as well keep to themselves "Scott's thirty thousand copies sold," which must sadly discomfit poor Southey's unsaleables, Poor Southey, it should seem, Though Madoc, with Pucelle,(1) instead of punk, May travel back to Quito-on a trunk! (2) Orpheus, we learn from Ovid and Lempriere, Next rose the martial Homer, Epic's prince, When oracles prevail'd, in times of old, In song alone Apollo's will was told. Then if your verse is what all verse should be? And gods were not ashamed on't, why should we? The Muse, like mortal females, may be woo'd; In turns she'll seem a Paphian, or a prude; Quod non edideris. Nescit vox missa reverti. is the "Lepidus" of this poetical triumvirate. I am only surprised to see him in such good company: "Such things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil he came there." The trio are well defined in the sixth proposition of Euclid; "Because, in the triangles DBC, ACB, D B is equal to A C, and BC common to both; the two sides D B, B C, are equal to the two AC, CB, each to each, and the angle DBC is equal to the angle ACB: therefore, the base DC is equal to the base A B, and the triangle DBC (Mr. Southey) is equal to the triangle A CB, the less to the greater, which is absurd," etc.-The editor of the Edinburgh Register will find the rest of the theorem hard by his stabling: he has only to cross the river; 'tis the first turnpike t'other side "Pons Asinorum." (1) Voltaire's Pucelle is not quite so immaculate as Mr. Southey's "Joan of Arc," and yet I am afraid the French This Latin has sorely puzzled the University of Edinburgh. Ballantyne said it meant the "Bridge of Berwick," but Southey claimed it as half English; Scott swore it was the "Brig o' Stirling;" he had just passed two King James's and a dozen Douglasses over it. At last it was decided by Jeffrey, that it meant nothing more nor Less than the counter of Archy Constable's shop." Fierce as a bride when first she feels affright, If verse be studied with some show of art, The youth who trains to ride, or run a race, Fool on, as fluent as an Orpheus' head; (6) Damn'd all their days, they posthumously thriveDug up from dust, though buried when alive! Pieriis tentata modis; ludusque repertus, Qui stadet optatam cursu contingere metam, Tibicen, didicit prius, extimuitque magistrum, man has both more truth and poetry too on his side-(they rarely go together)—than our patriotic minstrel, whose first essay was in praise of a fanatical French strumpet, whose title of witch would be correct with the change of the first letter, (2) Like Sir Bland Burgess's Richard; the tenth book of which I read at Malta, on a trunk of Eyres. 19, Cockspur street. If this be doubted, I shall buy a portmanteau to quote from. (3) Lord Byron had originally written "As lame as I am, but a better bard." The reader of Mr. Moore's Life will appreciate the feeling which, no doubt, influenced Lord Byron's alteration of the manuscript line.-L, E. (4) The Red Hand of Ulster, introduced generally in a canton, marks the shield of a baronet of the United King dom.-L. E. Reviews record this epidemic crime, Then leave, ye wise, the lyre's precarious chords The cobbler-laureats (1) sing to Capel Lofft! (2) There lives one druid, who prepares in time (1) I beg Nathaniel's pardon: he is not a cobbler; it is a failor, but begged Capel Lofft to sink the profession in his preface to two pair of panta-psha!-of cantos, which he wished the public to try on; but the sieve of a patron let it out, and so far saved the expense of an advertisement to his country customers. Merry's "Moorfields whine" was nothing to all this. The "Della Cruscans" were people of some education, and no profession; but these Arcadians (Arcades ambo"-bumpkins both) send out their native nonsense without the smallest alloy, and leave all the shoes and smallclothes in the parish unrepaired, to patch up Elepies on Enclosures and Peans to Gunpowder. Sitting on a shopboard, they describe fields of battle, when the only blood they ever saw was shed from the finger; and an Essay on War" is produced by the ninth part of a "poet." And own that nine such poets made & Tate." Did Nathan ever read that line of Pope? and, if he did, why not take it as his motto?-[See antè, p. 61, note 8.-P. E.] (2) This well-meaning gentleman has spoiled some excellent shoemakers, and been accessary to the poetical undoing of many of the industrious poor. Nathaniel Bloomfield and his brother Bobby have set all Somersetshire singing; nor has the malady confined itself to one county. Pratt too who once was wiser) has caught the contagion of patronage, and decoyed a poor fellow named Blackett into poetry; but he died during the operation, leaving one child and two volumes of Remains utterly destitute. The girl, if she don't take a poetical twist, and come forth as a shoemaking Sappho, may do well: but the "tragedies" are as rickety as if they had been the offspring of an Earl or a Seatonian prize poet. The patrons of this poor lad are certainly answerable for his end; and it ought to be an indictable offence. But this is the least they have done; for, by a refinement of barbarity, they have made the (late) man posthumously ridiculous, by printing what he would have had sense enough never to print himself. Certes these rakers of Remains come under the statute against "resurrection men." What does it signify whether a poor dear dead dance is to be stuck up in Surgeons' or in Stationers' Hall? Is it so bad to unearth his bones as his blunders? Is it not better to gibbet his body on a heath, than his soul in an octavo? "We know what we are, but we know not what we may be;" and it is to be hoped we never shall know, if a man who has passed through life with a sort of eclat, is to find himself a mountebank on the other side of Styx, and be made, like poor Joe Blackett, the laughing-stock of Purgatory. The plea of publication is to provide for the child; now, might not some of this "Sutor ultra crepidam's" friends and seducers have done a decent action ❘ without inveigling Pratt into biography? And then his inscription, split into so many modicums!-"To the Duchess of So-much, the Right Hon. So-and-So, and Mrs. and Miss Somebody, these volumes are, etc. etc."-why, this is doling out the "soft milk of dedication" in gills,-there is but a quart, and he divides it among a dozen. Why, Pratt, hadst But what is shame, or what is aught to him? Perhaps at some pert speech you've dared to frown, May Heaven forgive you, for he never can! thon not a puff left? Dost thou think six families of distinction can share this in quiet? There is a child, a book, and a dedication: send the girl to her grace, the volumes to the grocer, and the dedication to the devil.-[See antè, p. 61.-P. E.] (3) In the original MS.- "Some rhyming peer-Carlisle or Carysfort." To which is subjoined this note:-"Of John Joshua, Earl of Carysfort' I know nothing at present, but from an advertisement in an old newspaper of certain Poems and Tragedies by his Lordship, which I saw by accident in the Morea. Being a rhymer himself, he will forgive the liberty I take with his name, seeing, as he must, how very commodious it is at the close of that couplet; and as for what follows and goes before, let him place it to the account of the other Thane; since I cannot, under these circumstances, augur pro or con the contents of his foolscap crown octavos.'"-[John Joshua Proby, first Earl of Carysfort, was joint postmaster-general in 1805, envoy to Berlin in 1806, and ambassador to Petersburgh in 1807. Besides his poems, he published two pamphlets, to show the necessity of universal suffrage and short parliaments. He died in 1828.-L. E.] (4) Here will Mr. Gifford allow me to introduce once more to his notice the sole survivor, the "ultimas Romanorum," the last of the Cruscanti-"Edwin" the "profound," by our Lady of Punishment! here he is, as lively as in the days of "well said Baviad the Correct." I thought Fitzgerald had been the tail of poesy; but, alas! he is only the penultimate. A FAMILIAR EPISTLE TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING What reams of paper, floods of ink," Who novels read, and oft maintain'd ON SOME MODERN QUACKS AND REFORMISTS. |
