Appeared in a gown, and a vest of black satin, 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. 'Twould be endless to tell you the things that he knew, All separate facts, 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 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,— With a mind so well poised, it seemed equally made for Applause or abuse, just which chanced to be paid for; From this point his progress was rapid and sure, To the post of a regular heavy reviewer. And here I must say he wrote excellent articles On the Hebraic points, or the force of Greek particles, They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for; And nobody read that which nobody cared for; He could fill forty pages with safe erudition; And his very old nothings pleased very old fools; Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him, So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him, Carving new forms of truth out of Nature's old granite, New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier's planet, Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create In the soul of their critic the measure and weight, Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace, To compute their own judge, and assign him his place, Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it, And, reporting each circumstance just as he found it, Without the least malice,-his record would be Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print, for our sakes, Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes, Or, borne by an Arab guide, ventured to render a General view 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, 'twas 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. He meant well enough, but was still in the way, As a dunce always is, let him be where he may ; Indeed, they appear to come into existence To impede other folks with their awkward assist ance ; If you set up a dunce on the very North pole, To the grave polar bears sitting round on the ice, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of in tentions. A terrible fellow to meet in society, Not the toast that he buttered was ever so dry at tea; There he'd sit at the table and stir in his sugar, Crouching close for a spring, all the while, like a cougar; Be sure of your facts, of your measures and weights, The girls have all got their laughs ready, when, whack! The cougar comes down on your thunderstruck back! You had left out a comma,-your Greek's put in joint, And pointed at cost of your story's whole point. In the course of the evening, you venture on certain Soft speeches to Anne, in the shade of the curtain; You tell her your heart can be likened to one flower, "And that, oh most charming of women, 's the sun flower, Which turns"-here a clear nasal voice, to your terror, From outside the curtain, says "that's all an error. As for him, he's-no matter, he never grew tender, Sitting after a ball, with his feet on the fender, Shaping somebody's sweet features out of cigar smoke, (Though he'd willingly grant you that such doings are smoke ;) All women he damns with mutabile semper, And if ever he felt something like love's distemper, 'Twas towards a young lady who spoke ancient Mexican, And assisted her father in making a lexicon ; With character-painting, I'll turn to my story. Now, Apollo, who finds it convenient some times To get his court clear of the makers of rhymes, Every one of whom thinks himself treated most shabbily, And nurses a-what Which keeps him at boiling-point, hot for a quarrel, (Though he sometimes acknowledged their verse had a quieting Effect after dinner, and seemed to suggest a Kept our Hero at hand, who, by means of a bray, |