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"He whose broad cleaver chopped the sons of paint; Crushed like a marrowbone each lovely saint;

Spared not the very clothes about their backs;

The little duck-winged cherubims abused,

That could not more inhumanly be used,

Poor lambkins! had they fallen among the blacks;He, once so furious, soon shall want relief, Staked through the body like a paltry thief.

"How art thou fallen, O Cherokee !' they cry;
'How art thou fallen!' the joyful roofs resound;
Hell shall thy body for a rogue surround;
And there for ever roasting mayst thou lie:
Like Dives, mayst thou stretch in fires along,
Refused one drop of drink to cool thy tongue !'"

Ye goodly gentlemen, repress your yell;

Your hearty wishes for my health restrain;
For, if our works can put us into hell,

Kind Sirs! we certainly shall meet again.
Nay, what is worse, I really don't know whether
We must not lodge in the same room together.

II.

A MODEST love of praise I do not blame-
But I abhor a rape on Mistress Fame.
Although the lady is exceeding chaste,
Young forward bullies seize her round the waist;
Swear, nolens volens, that she shall be kissed;
And, though she vows she does not like 'em,
Nay, threatens for their impudence to strike 'em,
The saucy rascals still persist.

Reader!-of images here's no confusion

Thou therefore understand'st the bard's allusion.

But possibly thou hast a thickish head,

And therefore no vast quantity of brain :Why then, my precious pig of lead,

'Tis necessary to explain.

Some artists, if I so may call 'em,-
So ignorant, the foul fiend maul 'em,
Mere drivellers in the charming art,-
Are vastly fond of being praised,

Wish to the stars, like Blanchard,1 to be raised:
And raised they should be, reader,-from a cart.

1 The famous Aeronaut.

If disappointed in some Stentor's tongue,
Upon themselves they pour forth prose or song;
Or buy it in some venal paper,
And then heroically vapour.

What prigs to immortality aspire,

Who stick their trash around the room?Trash, meriting a very different doom,— I mean the warmer regions of the fire.

Heaven knows that I am angered to the soul

To find some blockheads of their works so vainSo proud to see them hanging cheek by jowl

With his1 whose powers the art's high fame sustain.

To wondrous merit their pretension,

On such vicinity-suspension,

Brings to my mind a not unpleasant story,
Which, gentle readers, let me lay before ye.

A shabby fellow chanced one day to meet
The British Roscius in the street,

Garrick, of whom our nation justly brags. The fellow hugged him, with a kind embrace. "Good Sir, I do not recollect your face,"

Quoth Garrick. "No?" replied the man of rags. "The boards of Drury you and I have trod

Full many a time together, I am sure."

"When?" with an oath cried Garrick; "for, by God, I never saw that face of yours before !—

What characters, I pray,

Did you and I together play?"

"Lord!" quoth the fellow, "think not that I mockWhen you played Hamlet, Sir,-I played the cock."2

1 The President Reynolds,

2 In the Ghost Scene.

CHARLES MORRIS.

[Captain Morris was born in 1740, and died in 1832).

THE CONTRAST.

IN London I never know what I'd be at,
Enraptured with this, and enchanted with that;
I'm wild with the sweets of variety's plan,
And Life seems a blessing too happy for man.

But the Country, Lord help me! sets all matters right,
So calm and composing from morning to night;
Oh! it settles the spirits when nothing is seen
But an ass on a common, a goose on a green.

In town if it rain, why it damps not our hope,
The eye has her choice, and the fancy her scope;
What harm though it pour whole nights or whole days?
It spoils not our prospects, or stops not our ways.

In the country what bliss, when it rains in the fields,
To live on the transports that shuttlecock yields;
Or go crawling from window to window, to see
A pig on a dunghill, or crow on a tree!

In London, if folks ill together are put,

A bore may be dropped, and a quiz may be cut ;
We change without end; and if lazy or ill,
All wants are at hand, and all wishes at will.

In the country you're nailed, like a pale in the park,
To some stick of a neighbour that's crammed in the ark;
And 'tis odds, if you're hurt, or in fits tumble down,
You reach death ere the doctor can reach you from town.

In London how easy we visit and meet !
Gay pleasure's the theme, and sweet smiles are our treat:
Our morning's a round of good-humoured delight,
And we rattle, in comfort, to pleasure at night.

In the country, how sprightly our visits we make
Through ten miles of mud, for Formality's sake!
With the coachman in drink, and the moon in a fog,
And no thought in our head but a ditch or a bog.

In London the spirits are cheerful and light,
All places are gay and all faces are bright;
We've ever new joys, and, revived by each whim,
Each day on a fresh tide of pleasure we swim.

R

But how gay in the country! what summer delight
To be waiting for winter from morning to night!
Then the fret of impatience gives exquisite glee
To relish the sweet rural subjects we see.

In town we've no use for the skies overhead,
For when the sun rises then we go to bed;
And as to that old-fashioned virgin the moon,
She shines out of season, like satin in June.

In the country these planets delightfully glare
Just to show us the object we want isn't there ;`
Oh how cheering and gay, when their beauties arise,
To sit and gaze round with the tears in one's eyes!

But 'tis in the country alone we can find
That happy resource, that relief of the mind,
When, drove to despair, our last efforts we make,
And drag the old fish-pond, for novelty's sake:

;

Indeed I must own, 'tis a pleasure complete
To see ladies well draggled and wet in their feet
But what is all that to the transport we feel
When we capture, in triumph, two toads and an eel?

I have heard, though, that love in a cottage is sweet,
When two hearts in one link of soft sympathy meet:
That's to come-for as yet I, alas! am a swain
Who require, I own it, more links to my chain.

Your magpies and stock-doves may flirt among trees,
And chatter their transports in groves, if they please :
But a house is much more to my taste than a tree,
And for groves, Oh! a good grove of chimneys for me!

In the country, if Cupid should find a man out,
The poor tortured victim mopes hopeless about;
But in London, thank Heaven! our peace is secure,
Where for one eye to kill there's a thousand to cure.

I know love's a devil, too subtle to spy,

That shoots through the soul from the beam of an eye ;
But in London these devils so quick fly about
That a new devil still drives an old devil out.

In town let me live then, in town let me die,
For in truth I can't relish the country, not I!
If one must have a villa in summer to dwell,
Oh give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall!

HANNAH MORE.

[Born at Stapleton, Gloucestershire, in 1745, daughter of a village schoolmaster; died at Clifton in 1833. The talents of Hannah excited attention at a very early age, and she set up a good day school, and afterwards a boardingschool. Her first printed work was the drama entitled The Search after Happiness; this was followed by Sacred Dramas, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, and a number of other works having for the most part a directly religious or didactic object].

THE BAS BLEU; OR, CONVERSATION.

ADDRESSED TO MRS. VESEY.

The following trifle owes its birth and name to the mistake of a Foreigner of distinction, who gave the literal appellation of the Bas-bleu to a small party of friends who had been often called, by way of pleasantry, the Blue Stockings. These little Societies have been sometimes misrepresented. They were composed of persons distinguished, in general, for their rank, talents, or respectable character, who met frequently at Mrs. Vesey's and at a few other houses, for the sole purpose of conversation, and were different in no respect from other parties but that the company did not play at cards.

May the author be permitted to bear her grateful testimony (which will not be suspected of flattery now that most of the persons named in this Poem are gone down to the grave) to the many pleasant and instructive hours she had the honour to pass in this company; in which learning was as little disfigured by pedantry, good taste as little tinctured by affectation, and general conversation as little disgraced by calumny, levity, and the other censurable errors with which it is too commonly tainted, as has perhaps been known in any Society.

VESEY! of Verse the judge and friend ! ́

A while my idle strain attend.
Not with the days of early Greece
I mean to ope my slender piece;
The rare Symposium to proclaim

Which crowned the Athenians' social name;
Or how Aspasia's parties shone,

The first Bas-bleu at Athens known;

Where Socrates unbending sat,

With Alcibiades in chat,

And Pericles vouchsafed to mix
Taste, wit, and mirth, with politics.
Nor need I stop my tale to show,
At least to readers such as you,
How all that Rome esteemed polite
Supped with Lucullus every night;
Lucullus, who, from Pontus come,

Brought conquests and brought cherries home.
Name but the suppers in the Apollo,

What classic images will follow!

How wit flew round, while each might take

Conchylia from the Lucrine lake;

And Attic salt, and Garum sauce,

And lettuce from the isle of Cos;

The first and last from Greece transplanted,

Used here because the rhyme I wanted,

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