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some folk, but the minute the game changes sides and the others begin it, they see something savage and horrible in it. As for me I respect neither women or men for their gender, nor own any sex in a pen. I choose just to hint to some causeless unfriends that, as far as I know, there are always two ends (and one of them heaviest, too) to a staff, and two parties also to every good laugh.

A FABLE FOR CRITICS.

PHOEBUS, sitting one day in a laurel-tree's shade, Was reminded of Daphne, of whom it was made, For the god being one day too warm in his wooing, She took to the tree to escape his pursuing;

Be the cause what it might, from his offers she shrunk,

And, Ginevra-like, shut herself up in a trunk; And, though 'twas a step into which he had driven her,

He somehow or other had never forgiven her;
Her memory he nursed as a kind of a tonic,
Something bitter to chew when he'd play the By-

ronic,

And I can't count the obstinate nymphs that he brought over,

By a strange kind of smile he put on when he thought of her.

"My case is like Dido's," he sometimes remark'd, "When I last saw my love, she was fairly em

bark'd,

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 forever 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 forever, 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 tree

fied,

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 rhyme was untwist

able, 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;

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