Who warns his friend ' To shake off toil and trouble,
And quit his books for fear of growing double ;'*
Who, both by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose
Convincing all, by demonstration plain,
Poetic souls delight in prose insane;
And Christmas stories tortured into rhyme
Contain the essence of the true sublime:
Thus when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of an idiot boy ;'
A moon-struck silly lad, who lost his way,
And, like his bard, confounded night with day ;t
So close on each pathetic part he dwells,
And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the idiot in his glory'
Conceive the bard the hero of the story.

Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here,
To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear ?
Though themes of innocence amuse him best,
Yet still Obscurity's a welcome guest.
If Inspiration should her aid refuse,
To him who takes a Pixy for a Muse,‡
Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass
The bard who soars to eulogize an ass.

* Lyrical Ballads, page 4.

-The tables turned.'

Stanza 1.

Up, up, my friend, and clear your looks,

Why all this toil and trouble?

Up, up, my friend, and quit your books,

Or surely you'll grow double.'

+ Mr. W. in his preface labours hard to prove that prose and verse are much the same, and certainly his precepts and practice are strictly conformable.

And thus to Betty's question he

Made answer like a traveller bold,
The cock did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,

And the sun did shine so cold,' &c. &c.

Lyrical Ballads, page 129.

+ Coleridge's Poems, page 11, Songs of the Pixies, i. e. Devonshire Fairies : page 42, we have 'Lines to a Young Lady:' and, page 52, Lines to a Young Ass.'

How well the subject suits his noble mind!
'A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.'

Oh! wonder-working Lewis! monk, or bard,
Who fain wouldst make Parnassus a churchyard!
Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow,
Thy Muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou!
Whether on ancient tombs thou takʼst thy stand,
By gibbering spectres hailed, thy kindred band;
Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page,
To please the females of our modest age;
All hail, M. P.!* from whose infernal brain
Thin sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train;
At whose command 'grim women' throng in crowds,
And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds,

With small grey men,' 'wild yagers,' and what not?
To crown with honour thee and Walter Scott:
Again all hail! if tales like thine may please,
St. Luke alone can vanquish the disease;
Even Satan's self with thee might dread to dwell,
And in thy skull discern a deeper hell.

Who in soft guise, surrounded by a choir

Of virgins melting, not to Vesta's fire,

With sparkling eyes, and cheek by passion flushed, Strikes his wild lyre, whilst listening dames are hushed? 'Tis Little! young Catullus of his day,

As sweet, but as immoral, in his lay!

Grieved to condemn, the Muse must still be just,

Nor spare melodious advocates of lust.

Pure is the flame which o'er her altar burns;

From grosser incense with disgust she turns;
Yet, kind to youth, this expiation o'er,
She bids thee mend thy line, and sin no more.'

For thee, translator of the tinsel song,
To whom such glittering ornaments belong,

'For every one knows little Matt's an M. P.'--See a poem to Mr. Lewis, in the Statesman,' supposed to be written by Mr. Jekyll.

Hibernian Strangford! with thine eyes of blue,*
And boasted locks of red, or auburn hue,

Whose plaintive strain each love-sick Miss admires,
And o'er harmonious fustian half expires,
Learn, if thou canst, to yield thine author's sense,
Nor vend thy sonnets on a false pretence.
Think'st thou to gain thy verse a higher place
By dressing Camoens in a suit of lace?

Mend, Strangford! mend thy morals and thy taste;
Be warm, but pure; be amorous, but be chaste:
Cease to deceive, thy pilfered harp restore,
Nor teach the Lusian bard to copy Moore.

In many marble-covered volumes view
Hayley, in vain attempting something new:
Whether he spin his comedies in rhyme,

Or scrawl, as Wood and Barclay walk, 'gainst time,
His style in youth or age is still the same-
For ever feeble and for ever tame.

Triumphant first see Temper's Triumphs' shine!
At least I'm sure they triumphed over mine.
Of 'Music's Triumphs' all who read may swear
That luckless Music never triumphed there.†

Moravians, rise! bestow some meet reward
On dull Devotion-lo! the Sabbath bard
Sepulchral Grahame, pours his notes sublime
In mangled prose, nor even aspires to rhyme,
Breaks into blank the Gospel of St. Luke,
And boldly pilfers from the Pentateuch;

* The reader who may wish for an explanation of this may refer to 'Strangford's Camoens,' page 127, note to page 56, or to the last page of the Edinburgh Review of Strangford's Camoens.

It is also to be remarked that the things given to the public as poems of Camoens are no more to be found in the original Portuguese than in the Song of Solomon.

+ Hayley's two most notorious verse productions are 'Triumphs of Temper' and Triumphs of Music. He has also written much Comedy in rhyme, Epistles, &c. &c. As he is rather an elegant writer of notes and biography, let us recommend Pope's advice to Wycherley to Mr. H.'s consideration: viz. to convert his poetry into prose,' which may be easily done by taking away the final syllable of each couplet

And, undisturbed by conscientious qualms,
Perverts the Prophets, and purloins the Psalms.*
Hail, Sympathy! thy soft idea brings

A thousand visions of a thousand things,

And shows, dissolved in thine own melting tears,
The maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers.

And art thou not their prince, harmonious Bowles!
Thou first great oracle of tender souls-
Whether in sighing winds thou seek'st relief,
Or consolation in a yellow leaf;

Whether thy Muse most lamentably tells
What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells,+
Or, still in bells delighting, finds a friend
In every chime that jingled from Ostend?
Ah! how much juster were ethy Muse's hap,
If to thy bells thou wouldst but add a cap!
Delightful Bowles! still blessing and still blessed,
All love thy strain, but children like it best.
'Tis thine, with gentle Little's moral song,
To sooth the mania of the amorous throng!
With thee our nursery damsels shed their tears,
Ere Miss, as yet, completes her infant years:
But in her teens thy whining powers are vain;
She quits poor Bowles for Little's purer strain.

Now to soft themes thou scornest to confine
The lofty numbers of a harp like thine:
'Awake a louder and a loftier strain,'‡

Such as none heard before, or will again;

* Mr. Grahame has poured fourth two volumes of cant, under the name of Sabbath Walks' and Biblical Pictures.'

↑ See Bowles's Sonnets, &c. Sonnet to Oxford,' and 'Stanzas on hearing the bells of Ostend.'

+ Awake a louder,' &c. &c. is the first line in Bowles's 'Spirit of Discovery; a very spirited and pretty dwarf Epic. Among other exquisite lines we have the following:

A kiss

Stole on the listening silence, never yet

Here heard; they trembled even as if the power,' &c. &c.

That is, the woods of Madeira trembled to a kiss; very mucli astonished, as well they might be, at such a phenomenon.

Where all discoveries jumbled from the flood,
Since first the leaky ark reposed in mud,
By more or less, are sung in every book,
From Captain Noah down to Captain Cook.
Nor this alone, but, pausing on the road,
The bard sighs forth a gentle episode;
And gravely tells-attend, each beauteous Miss!
When first Madeira trembled to a kiss.

Bowles, in thy memory let this precept dwell-
Stick to thy sonnets, man! at least they sell.
But if some new-born whim or larger bribe
Prompt thy crude brain, and claim thee for a scribe
If chance some bard, though once by dunces feared,
Now, prone in dust, can only be revered-

If Pope, whose fame and genius from the first
Have foiled the best of critics, needs the worst-
Do thou essay; each fault, each failing, scan ;
The first of poets was, alas"! but man!
Rake from each ancient dunghill every pearl,
Consult Lord Fanny, and confide in Curll;+
Let all the scandals of a former age
Perch on thy pen and flutter o'er thy page;
Affect a candour which thou canst not feel,
Clothe envy in the garb of honest zeal;
Write as if St. John's soul could still inspire,
And do from hate what Mallet‡ did for hire.

Oh! hadst thou lived in that congenial time,
To rave with Dennis, and with Ralph to rhyme ;§

* The episode above alluded to is the story of Robert a Machin' and ' Anna d'Arfet,' a pair of constant lovers, who performed the kiss above mentioned, that startled the woods of Madeira.

+ Curll is one of the heroes of the 'Dunciad,' and was a bookseller. Lord Fanny is the poetical name of Lord Hervey, author of 'Lines to the Imitator of Horace.'

Lord Bolingbroke hired Mallet to traduce Pope after his decease, because the poet had retained some copies of a work by Lord Bolingbroke, (the 'Patriot King,') which that splendid, but malignant genius, had ordered to be destroyed. § Dennis, the critic, and Ralph, the rhymester.

⚫ Silence, ye wolves! while Ralph to Cynthia howls,

Making night hideous; answer him, ye owls !'- Dunciad.