ders remain of the public's own make, which I wish to correct for my personal sake. For instance, a character drawn in pure fun and condensing the traits of a dozen in one, has been, as I hear, by some persons applied to a good friend of mine, whom to stab in the side, as we walked along chatting and joking together, would not be my way. I can hardly tell whether a question will ever arise in which he and I should by any strange fortune agree, but meanwhile my esteem for him grows as I know him, and, though not the best judge on earth of a poem, he knows what it is he is saying and why, and is honest and fearless, two good points which I have not found so rife I can

easily smother my love for them, whether on my side or t'other.

For my other anonymi, you may be sure that I know what is meant by a caricature, and what by a portrait. There are those who think it is capital fun to be spattering their ink on quiet, unquarrelsome folk, but the minute the game changes sides and the others begin it, they see something savage and horrible in it. As for me I respect neither women nor men for their gender, nor own any sex in a pen. I choose just to hint to some causeless unfriends that, as far as I know, there are always two ends (and one of them heaviest, too) to a staff, and two parties also to every good laugh.

PHOEBUS, sitting one day in a laureltree's shade,

Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made,

For the god being one day too warm in his wooing,

She took to the tree to escape his pursuing ;

Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,

And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk;

And, though 't was a step into which he had driven her,

He somehow or other had never forgiven her;

Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,

Something bitter to chew when he 'd play the Byronic,

And I can't count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over,

By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.

66

My case is like Dido's," he sometimes remarked:

"When I last saw my love, she was fairly embarked

but (ah

In a laurel, as she thoughthow Fate mocks!) She has found it by this time a very bad

box;

Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it, You're not always sure of your game when you've treed it.

Just conceive such a change taking place in one's mistress! What romance would be left?-who can flatter or kiss trees? And, for mercy's sake, how could one keep up a dialogue

('T was before he had made his intentions explicit),

Some buds she arranged with a vast deal of care,

To look as if artlessly twined in her hair, Where they seemed, as he said, when he paid his addresses,

Like the day breaking through the long night of her tresses;

So whenever he wished to be quite irresistible,

Like a man with eight trumps in his hand at a whist-table

(I feared me at first that the rhyme was untwistable,

Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Cristabel),—

Why not use their ears, if they happen to have any?"

- Here the laurel-leaves murmured the name of poor Daphne.

"O, weep with me, Daphne," he sighed, "for you know it's

A terrible thing to be pestered with poets !

But, alas, she is dumb, and the proverb holds good,

She never will cry till she's out of the wood!

What would n't I give if I never had known of her?

'Twere a kind of relief had I something to groan over:

If I had but some letters of hers, now, to toss over,

I might turn for the nonce a Byronic philosopher,

And bewitch all the flats by bemoaning

the loss of her.

One needs something tangible, though, to begin on,

A loom, as it were, for the fancy to spin

on;

What boots all your grist? it can never be ground

Till a breeze makes the arms of the windmill go round

(Or, if 't is a water-mill, alter the metaphor,

And say it won't stir, save the wheel be well wet afore,

Or lug in some stuff about water "so dreamily,"

It is not a metaphor, though, 't is a simile) :

A lily, perhaps, would set my mill a-going,

For just at this season, I think, they are blowing.

Here, somebody, fetch one, not very far hence

They're in bloom by the score, 't is but climbing a fence; There's a poet hard by, who does nothing but fill his

Whole garden, from one end to t'other, with lilies;

A very good plan, were it not for satiety,

One longs for a weed here and there, for variety;

Without the least question of larger or less,

Whose stomachs are strong at the expense of their head,

For reading new books is like eating new bread,

One can bear it at first, but by gradual steps he

Is brought to death's door of a mental dyspepsy.

On a previous stage of existence, our Hero

Had ridden outside, with the glass below zero;

He had been, 't is a fact you may safely rely on,

Of a very old stock a most eminent scion,

A stock all fresh quacks their fierce boluses ply on,

Who stretch the new boots Earth's unwilling to try on, Whom humbugs of all shapes and sorts keep their eye on, Whose hair 's in the mortar of every new Zion,

Who, when whistles are dear, go directly and buy one,

Who think slavery a crime that we must not say fie on,

Who hunt, if they e'er hunt at all, with the lion

(Though they hunt lions also, whenever they spy one),

Who contrive to make every good for tune a wry one,

And at last choose the hard bed of honor to die on,

Whose pedigree, traced to earth's earliest years,

Is longer than anything else but their

Through his babyhood no kind of pleasure he took

In any amusement but tearing a book; For him there was no intermediate stage From babyhood up to straight-laced middle age;

There were years when he did n't wear coat-tails behind,

But a boy he could never be rightly defined:

Like the Irish Good Folk, though in length scarce a span, From the womb he came gravely, a little old man ;

While other boys' trousers demanded the toil

Of the motherly fingers on all kinds of soil,

Red, yellow, brown, black, clayey, gravelly, loamy,

He sat in the corner and read Viri Romæ.

He never was known to unbend or to revel once

In base, marbles, hockey, or kick up the devil once;

He was just one of those who excite the benevolence

In this way our hero got safely to college,

Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge;

A reading-machine, always wound up and going,

He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing,

Appeared in a gown, and a vest of black satin,

To spout such a Gothic oration in Latin

That Tully could never have made out a word in it

(Though himself was the model the author preferred in it), And grasping the parchment which gave him in fee

All the mystic and-so-forths contained in A. B.,

He was launched (life is always compared to a sea),

With just enough learning, and skill for the using it,

To prove he 'd a brain, by forever confusing it.

So worthy St. Benedict, piously burning

With the holiest zeal against secular learning,

Nesciensqe scienter, as writers express it,

Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit.