Yet art and nature join'd will win the prize, The youth who trains to ride, or run a race, Must bear privations with unruffled face, Be call'd to labour when he thinks to dine, And, harder still, leave wenching and his wine. Ladies who sing, at least who sing at sight, Have followed music through her farthest flight; But rhymers tell you neither more nor less, "I've got a pretty poem for the press ;" And that's enough; then write and print so fast;If Satan take the hindmost, who'd be last? They storm the types, they publish, one and all, They leap the counter, and they leave the stall. Provincial maidens, men of high command, Yea, baronets have ink'd the bloody hand! (1) Cash cannot quell them; Pollio (2) play'd this prank, (Then Phoebus first found credit in a bank !) Not all the living only, but the dead, Fool on, as fluent as an Orpheus' head ; (3) Qui studet optatam cursu contingere metam, Nunc satis est dixisse; ego mira poemata pango: (1) [The Red Hand of Ulster, introduced generally in a canton, marks the shield of a baronet of the United Kingdom. -E.] (2) [" Pollio."— In the original MS. " Rogers.”—E] (3) "Tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice revulsum, Damn'd all their days, they posthumously thrive- Those Books of Martyrs to the rage for rhyme. In Morning Post, or Monthly Magazine. Or country Crispins, now grown somewhat stale, Occupet extremum scabies; mihi turpe relinqui est, * * * (1) I beg Nathaniel's pardon: he is not a cobbler; it is a tailor, 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 Elegies on Enclosures and Pæans 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 16 poet." "And own that nine such poets made a Tate." Did Nathan ever read that line of Pope? and if he did, why not take it as his motto? - [See antè, Vol. VII. p. 269. note. - E.] 1 (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 Somerset hire 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 Till, lo ! that modern Midas, as he hears, There lives one druid, who prepares in time 'Gainst future feuds his poor revenge of rhyme; Racks his dull memory, and his duller muse, To publish faults which friendship should excuse. If friendship's nothing, self-regard might teach More polish'd usage of his parts of speech. But what is shame, or what is aught to him? He vents his spleen, or gratifies his whim. Some fancied slight has roused his lurking hate, Some folly cross'd, some jest, or some debate; destitute. The girl, if she don't take a poetical twist, and come forth as a shoe-making 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 dunce 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 éclat, is to find himself a mountebank on the other side of Styx, and 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 Crepidum'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 Somuch, the Right Hon. So-and-So, and Mrs. and Miss Somebody, these volumes are, &c. &c."-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 thou 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, Vol. VII. p. 269.-E.] Up to his den Sir Scribbler hies, and soon Perhaps at some pert speech you've dared to frown, May Heaven forgive you, for he never can! "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.--E] (2) Here will Mr. Gifford allow me to introduce once more to his notice the sole survivor, the "ultimus 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. All but one poor dependent priest withdrawn, Then spouts and foams, and cries at every line, He strides and stamps along with creaking boot, A FAMILIAR EPISTLE TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING CHRONICLE. "WHAT reams of paper, floods of ink," Without the risk of giving pain, &c. &c. ON SOME MODERN QUACKS AND REFORMISTS. IN tracing of the human mind Though strange, 'tis true, we often find It knows not its resources: And men through life assume a part For which no talents they possess, Yet wonder that, with all their art, They meet no better with success, &c. &c. |