say Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only let them be big enough, no matter what). Come, you shall be Byron or Pope, which you choose: I'll be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews." So they both (as mere strangers) before many days send each other a cord of anonymous bays. Each, piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his friend can be made to believe; each, reading the other's unbiassed review, thinks -Here's pretty high praise, but no more than is true. Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great fuss when the same farce is acted to benefit us. Even I, who, if asked, scarce a month since, what Fudge meant, should have answered the dear Public's critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke sooth when he said, that the Public sometimes hit the truth.

In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty good health and condition, and yet, since I put forth my primary edition, I have been crushed, scorched, withered, used up and put down (by Smith with the cordial assistance of Brown), in all, if you put any faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and, while I am writing,—I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment be just on the brink of it, Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has begun a critique,am I not to be pitied? *

Now I shall not crush them since, indeed, for that matter, no pressure I know of could render them flatter; nor wither, nor scorch them,-no action of fire could make either them or their articles drier; nor waste time in putting them down -I am thinking not their own selfinflation will keep them from sinking; for there's this contradiction about the whole bevy, though

*The wise Scandinavians probably

called their bards by the queer-looking title of Scald, in a delicate way, as it were, just to hint to the world the hot water they always get into.

without the least weight, they are awfully heavy. No, my dear honest bore, surdo fabulam narras, they are no more to me than a rat in the arras. I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half-comic sorrow, to think that they all will be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up on the wastepaper shelves, and forgotten by all but their half-dozen selves. Once snug in my attic, my fire in a roar, I leave the whole pack of them outside the door. With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get fou with O'Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax tender, o'er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne's Jacob's-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton's version) Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth undreamed of before, that divinely inspired, wise, deep, tender, grand-bore. Or, out of my study, the scholar thrown off, Nature holds up her shield 'gainst the sneer and the scoff; the landscape, for ever consoling and kind, pours her wine and her oil on the smarts of the mind. The waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems; the tall grove of hemlocks, with moss on their stems, like plashes of sunlight; the pond in the woods, where no foot but mine and the bittern's intrudes; these are all my kind neighbours, and leave me no wish to say aught to you all, my poor critics, but-pish! I have buried the hatchet: I am twisting an allumette out of one of you now, private capacities come when you and relighting my calumet. In your please, I will give you my hand and a fresh pipe apiece.

66

'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, 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

With a dull wooden thing that will live and will die a log,Not to say that the thought would for ever intrude

That you've less chance to win her the more she is wood? Ah! it went to my heart, and the memory still grieves,

To see those loved graces all taking their leaves;

Those charms beyond speech, so enchanting but now,

As they left me for ever, each making its bough!

If her tongue had a tang sometimes more than was right,

Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite."

Now, Daphne - before she was happily treeified

Over all other blossoms the lily had deified,

And when she expected the god on a visit

('Twas 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 rhymc was untwistable,

Though I might have lugged in an allusion to Cristabel),He would take up a lily, and gloomily look in it, As I shall at the -

when they cut up my book in it.

Well, here, after all the bad

rhyme I've been spinning, I've got back at last to my story's beginning:

Sitting there, as I say, in the shade of his mistress,

As dull as a volume of old Chester mysteries,

Or as those puzzling specimens which, in old histories,

We read of his verses-the Oracles, namely,

(I wonder the Greeks should have swallowed them tamely, 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 moustache, 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 pro

ceeding felonious, Have they all of them slept in the

cave of Trophonius? Look well to your seat, 'tis like taking an airing

On a corduroy road, and that out of repairing;

It leads one, 'tis 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 wouldn'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

One longs for a weed here and

there for variety; Though a weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes."

Now there happened to be among

Phoebus's followers,

A gentleman, one of the omnivorous swallowers,

Who bolt every book that comes out

of the press, 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

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, when

ever they spy one), Who contrive to make every good

fortune a wry one, And at last choose the hard bed of honour to die on, Whose pedigree, traced to earth's earliest years,

Is longer than anything else but their ears;

In short he was sent into life with the wrong key,

He unlocked the door, and stept forth a poor donkey. Though kicked and abused by his bipedal betters,

Yet he filled no mean place in the kingdom of letters; Far happier than many a literary hack,

He bore only paper-mill rags on his back

(For it makes a vast difference which side the mill

One expends on the paper his labour and skill);

So, when his soul waited a new transmigration,

And Destiny balanced 'twixt this and that station,

Not having much time to expend upon bothers,

Remembering he'd had some connection with authors,

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 straightlaced middle age; There were years when he didn'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 boy's trousers de-manded 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;