hard by recall to September the blue of June's sky; these are all my kind neighbors, and leave me no wish to say aught to you all, my poor critics, but - pish! I've buried the hatchet: I'm twisting an allumette out of one of you now, and relighting my calumet. In your private capacities, come when you please, I will give you my hand and a fresh pipe apiece.

As I ran through the leaves of my poor little book, to take a fond author's first tremulous look, it was quite an excitement to hunt the errata, sprawled in as birds' tracks are in some kinds of strata (only these made things crookeder). Fancy an heir that a father had seen born wellfeatured and fair, turning suddenly wrynosed, club-footed, squint-eyed, hair-lipped, wapper-jawed, carrot-haired, from a pride become an aversion, - my case was yet worse. A club-foot (by way of a change) in a verse, I might have forgiven, an o's being wry, a limp in an e, or a cock in an i, but to have the sweet babe of my brain served in pi! I am not queasystomached, but such a Thyestean banquet as that was quite out of the question.

In the edition now issued no pains are neglected, and my verses, as orators say, stand corrected. Yet some blunders 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

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.

A FABLE FOR CRITICS

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.

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

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

In a laurel, as she thought- but (ah, how Fate mocks!)

She has found it by this time a very bad box;

Let hunters from me take this saw when they need it,

For one might bet safely whatever he has to risk,

They were laid at his door by some ancient Miss Asterisk,

And so dull that the men who retailed them out-doors

Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores,-)

First, he mused what the animal substance or herb is

Would induce a mustache, for you know he 's imberbis ;

Then he shuddered to think how his youthful position

Was assailed by the age of his son the physician;

At some poems he glanced, had been sent to him lately,

And the metre and sentiment puzzled him greatly;

"Mehercle! I'd make such proceeding

felonious,

Have they all of them slept in the cave of Trophonius?

Look well to your seat, 't is like taking an airing

On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing;

It leads one, 't is true, through the primitive forest,

Grand natural features, but then one has no rest;

You just catch a glimpse of some ravishing distance,

When a jolt puts the whole of it out of existence,

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

- Here the laurel-leaves murmured the

name of poor Daphne.

"Oh, 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?

'T were a kind of relief had I something to groan over:

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

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

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 fortune

And considering his four legs had grown paralytic,

She set him on two, and he came forth a critic.

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 mid-
dle 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

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, with black waistcoat of 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,

Nesciensque scienter, as writers express it,
Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit.

"T would be endless to tell you the
things that he knew,

Each a separate fact, undeniably true, But with him or each other they'd nothing to do;

No power of combining, arranging, discerning,

Digested the masses he learned into learning;

There was one thing in life he had practical knowledge for

(And this, you will think, he need scarce go to college for),

Not a deed would he do, nor a word would he utter,

Till he'd weighed its relations to plain bread and butter.

When he left Alma Mater, he practised his wits

In compiling the journals' historical bits, — Of shops broken open, men falling in

fits,

Great fortunes in England bequeathed to poor printers,

And cold spells, the coldest for many past winters,

Profoundly æsthetic as that of a flea, Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print, for our sakes,

Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes,

Or, lodged by an Arab guide, ventured to render a

Comprehensive account of the ruins at Denderah.

As I said, he was never precisely unkind, The defect in his brain was just absence of mind;

If he boasted, 't was simply that he was self-made,

A position which I, for one, never gainsaid,

My respect for my Maker supposing a skill In his works which our Hero would answer but ill;

And I trust that the mould which he used may be cracked, or he,

Made bold by success, may enlarge his phylactery,

And set up a kind of a man-manufactory, An event which I shudder to think about, seeing

That Man is a moral, accountable being.

To impede other folks with their awkward assistance;

If you set up a dunce on the very North pole

All alone with himself, I believe, on my soul,

He'd manage to get betwixt somebody's shins,

And pitch him down bodily; all in his sins, To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice,

All shortening their grace, to be in for a slice;

Or, if he found nobody else there to pother, Why, one of his legs would just trip up the other,

For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions,

Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.

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