For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him, 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

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

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 ex

istence

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.

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,

Of your time, --he's as fond as an Arab of dates:

You'll be telling, perhaps, in your comical way,

Of something you've seen in the course of the day:

And, just as you 're tapering out the conclusion,

You venture an ill-fated classic allusion,

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, O most charming of women, 's the sunflower,

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,

'I was towards a young lady who spoke ancient Mexican,

And assisted her father in making a lexicon ;

Though I recollect hearing him get quite ferocious

About Mary Clausum, the mistress of Grotius,

Or something of that sort, but, no more to bore ye

With character-painting, I'll turn to my story.

Now, Apollo, who finds it convenient sometimes

To get his court clear of the makers of rhymes,

The genus, I think it is called, irrita

As bitter as wormwood, and sourer than sorrel,

If any poor devil but look at a laurel ;Apollo, I say, being sick of their rioting

(Though he sometimes acknowledged their verse had a quieting

Effect after dinner, and seemed to suggest a

Retreat to the shrine of a tranquil siesta),

Kept our Hero at hand, who, by means of a bray,

Whic: he gave to the life, drove the rabble away;

And if that would n't do, he was sure to succeed,

If he took his review out and offered to read;

Or, failing in plans of this milder description,

He would ask for their aid to get up a subscription,

Considering that authorship was n't a rich craft,

To print the "American drama of Witchcraft."

"Stay, I'll read you a scene," — but he hardly began,

Ere Apollo shrieked

Help!" and the

authors all ran: And once, when these purgatives acted with less spirit,

And the desperate case asked a remedy desperate,

He drew from his pocket a foolscap epistle,

As calmly as if 't were a nine-barrelled pistol,

And threatened them all with the judg

ment to come,

Of "A wandering Star's first impressions of Rome."

66

66

'Stop! stop!" with their hands o'er their ears, screamed the Muses, 'He may go off and murder himself, if he chooses,

'T was a means self-defence only sanctioned his trying,

'Tis mere massacre now that the enemy's flying;

If he 's forced to 't again, and we happen to be there,

Give us each a large handkerchief soaked in strong ether."

I called this a "Fable for Critics"; you think it's

More like a display of my rhythmical trinkets;

My plot, like an icicle, 's slender and slippery,

Every moment more slender, and likely to slip awry,

And the reader unwilling in loco desipere,

Is free to jump over as much of my frippery

As he fancies, and, if he's a provident skipper, he

May have an Odyssean sway of the gales,

And get safe to port, ere his patience quite fails;

Moreover, although 't is a slender re

But, as Cicero says he won't say this or that

(A fetch, I must say, most transparent and flat),

After saying whate'er he could possibly think of,

I simply will state that I pause on the brink of

A mire, ankle-deep, of deliberate confusion,

Made

up of old jumbles of classic allusion,

So, when you were thinking yourselves to be pitied,

Just conceive how much harder your teeth you'd have gritted,

An 't were not for the dulness I've kindly omitted.

I'd apologize here for my many digressions,

Were it not that I'm certain to trip into fresh ones

('Tis so hard to escape if you get in their mesh once);

Just reflect, if you please, how 't is said by Horatius,

That Mæonides nods now and then, and, my gracious!

It certainly does look a little bit omi

nous

When he gets under way with ton d'apameibomenos.

(Here a something occurs which I'll just clap a rhyme to,

And say it myself, ere a Zoilus have time to,

Any author a nap like Van Winkle's may take,

If he only contrive to keep readers awake,

But he'll very soon find himself laid on the shelf,

If they fall a-nodding when he nods himself.)

Once for all, to return, and to stay, will I, nill I

When Phoebus expressed his desire for a lily,

Our hero, whose homoeopathic sagacity With an ocean of zeal mixed his drop

(Or, to take a comparison more to my mind,

As a sound politician leaves conscience

behind),

And leaped the low fence, as a party hack jumps

O'er his principles, when something else turns up trumps.

He was gone a long time, and Apollo, meanwhile,

Went over some sonnets of his with a file,

For, of all compositions, he thought that the sonnet

Best repaid all the toil you expended upon it;

It should reach with one impulse the end of its course,

And for one final blow collect all of its force;

Not a verse should be salient, but each one should tend

With a wave-like up-gathering to burst at the end;

So, condensing the strength here, there smoothing a wry kink,

He was killing the time, when upwalked Mr.;

At a few steps behind him, a small man in glasses

Went dodging about, muttering, "Murderers! asse !"

From out of his pocket a paper he'd take, With the proud look of martyrdom tied

to its stake,

Not so bad as those daubs of the Sun, to be sure,

Yet done with a dagger-o'-type, whose vile portraits

Disperse all one's good and condense all one's poor traits.

Apollo looked up, hearing footsteps approaching,

And slipped out of sight the new rhymes he was broaching, "Good day, Mr. I'm happy to

meet,

With a scholar so ripe, and a critic so neat,

Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries ;

What news from that suburb of London and Paris

Which latterly makes such shrill claims to monopolize

The credit of being the New World's metropolis?"