Such names at present cut a convict figure, Are good manure for their more bare biography. He there builds up a formidable dyke Between his own and others' intellect; We learn from Horace, "Homer sometimes sleeps; We feel without him, Wordsworth sometimes wakes, To show with what complacency he creeps, With his dear" Waggoners," around his lakes. Of ocean? No, of air; and then he makes If he must fain sweep o'er the ethereal plain, Or if too classic for his vulgar brain, He fear'd his neck to venture such a nag on, And he must needs mount nearer to the moon, Could not the blockhead ask for a balloon? "Pedlars," and "Boats," and " Waggons!" Oh! ye shades Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this? Contempt, but from the bathos' vast abyss POETICAL COMMANDMENTS. (DON JUAN, Canto i. Stanzas 204-206.) If ever I should condescend to prose, That went before; in these I shall enrich Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; Because the first is crazed beyond all hope, The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthy: With Crabbe it may be difficult to cope, And Campbell's Hipprocrene is somewhat drouthy: Thou shalt not steal from Samuel Rogers, nor Commit - flirtation with the muse of Moore. Thou shalt not covet Mr. Sotheby's Muse, His Pegasus, nor any thing that 's his; Thou shalt not bear false witness like "the Blues" Exactly as you please, or not -the rod; BYRON AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. (DON JUAN, Canto xi. Stanzas 53-60.) JUAN knew several languages as well He might and brought them up with skill, in time To save his fame with each accomplish'd belle, Who still regretted that he did not rhyme. However, he did pretty well, and was The coteries, and, as in Banquo's glass, He saw ten thousand living authors pass, In twice five years the "greatest living poet," Even I albeit I 'm sure I did not know it, The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme. But Juan was my Moscow, and Faliero My Leipsic, and my Mont Saint Jean seems Cain: "La Belle Alliance" of dunces down at zero, Now that the Lion 's fall'n, may rise again: But I will fall at least as fell my hero; Nor reign at all, or as a monarch reign; Or to some lonely isle of gaolers go, With turncoat Southey for my turnkey Lowe. Sir Walter reign'd before me; Moore and Campbell Before and after; but now grown more holy, The Muses upon Sion's hill must ramble With poets almost clergymen, or wholly; Beneath the very Reverend Rowley Powley, Then there's my gentle Euphues; who, they say, To turn out both, or either, it may be. John Keats, who was kill'd off by one critique, Contrived to talk about the gods of late 'T is strange the mind, that very fiery particle, The list grows long of live and dead pretenders His last award, will have the long grass grow Their chances; they 're too numerous, like the thirty Mock tyrants, when Rome's annals wax'd but dirty. |