THE ECCENTRIC POET,* A SKETCH. YOU shall perceive him dive his hand into his pocket; he would insinuate by this, and have you infer, that he has money, but no such thing is there; it were as reasonable to expect that the collision of two flakes of snow would make a jingle, as hope to hear the sound of one shilling duetting-it with another. The hand went in empty, it came out so; and though he buttons up that pocket so carefully, there is nothing in it :it is as empty as Coates's head, and farthingless as a poor's box. About four you shall perceive him picking his teeth with the worn-down stump of a pen that has written you, in its time, half a dozen odes To the scornful Nona, who proves to be his landlady, a fat and fifty-yearold widow ;-a folio of poems upon Fortune and Hope, Charity and Independence;-odes On Retirement, composed in the seclusion of his back-garret; together with some hundred sonnets to and on ruins, woods forests, hills, castles, rivers, streamlets and lakes the "overflowings of his mind," and ten sonnets on a waterfall, written to the overflowings of his landlady's water-butt;-a hundred extempores, (each of them produced after a long November night's labour; a few dozen of dedication-asking letters to beggarly noblemen, by which he netted a clear profit of twenty kicks on his unseated seat of honor, thirty door-shuttings in his face, and a French half-crown insinuated into his pocket by a sentimental fat porter at a great man's door, who proved to be more of a Mæcenas than his master; besides plays, operas, and farces; and pamphlets on the easiest mode of paying off the national debt, written when he was dunned for twopence, an arrear in an account of three-pence due to his milkwoman. Now you would suppose this picking of teeth indicated his having dined; no such thing; he This piece has been printed before, but incorrectly. It is now given with the author's corrections and additions. ↑ Wordsworth, picks them, that he may remind you to remark, "What, you have dined?" upon which he promptly answers, "No, only lunched; that is, he has eaten a gooseberry. You cannot choose but have him to dinner; and then you learn by the state of his appetite that he breakfasted with Duke Humphrey. He says little during dinner; he allows that there was an appetite-provoking air in the park that morning; and when he gives over eating, which is a very protracted operation, remarks, to prevent your doing it," I don't know when I ate a heartier dinner; neither does he, unless you can tell him when he last dined with you, or where he dined the day before. For his wit, which savours of the true attic, it comes in with the salt, but it is broached with the wine. He denies that beef is "a sore spoiler of your wit." He is witty because it is expected of him; but his wit is, at first, rather disagreeable and bitter; it is sauce piquante to your meat, and an olive to your wine. Like wormwood, the more you have of it, the less you dislike it, and you at last palate it. He takes care to say as many brilliant things as the dullards, his auditors, will be a week in retailing as their own--my lord takes all he says on books and women as his share; and my lady all he says on men as her's. For his suit, you instantly know it to be the livery of those elderly maiden ladies the Muses, to whose suite he is attached, con amore. His coat, once black, is, through long exposure, of a dun colour-the most disagreeable of all complexions to the eye of a dunned poet. All things change! Its white button-moulds were once snugly enveloped in the best dark drab; but, after much struggling, they have at last protruded themselves into public notice; and as they more or less shew their bony faces, remind us of the Moon in her various quarters or phases. For the rest of his suit it is suitable; and is in what painters call keeping with what I have just described. Most likely his stockings are of a rusty, mouse-coloured black; and his shoes are very like to be less brilliant than his head. Day and Martin would sneer at their poverty of polish, and fall to blessing their stars that they have more blacking than wit. E His lodging is as high as his circumstances are low : its furniture will be hard to describe, seeing that it has none. His bed is a truckle one; he reconciles its poverty to himself, indeed he considers it poetical, for he remembers that that choice-spirit Mercutio, preferred his truckle to a field bed. It lies immediately beneath a window that looks as much like a chessboard as a window, one pane being white, and giving as much light as its unclean dinginess will allow; and the next black, (or blocked up like a late Admiral's eye) the net-work of a cobweb serves as a ventilator in one corner, and Baxter's" Light to the Unconverted" darkens the skylight. He has a chair sans back; and a deal table, a deal too large for the most unscanted meal ever spread on it by its present possessor. Then he has a corner cup-board, "more for ornament than an old-fashioned, lacquered, and gilt thing, like the Lord Mayor's coach, containing in its compartments, two views of Chinese pagodas, and Mandarins, and tea-trees, and bridges, &c. the gilding nearly gone. Its non-contents are too numerous to mention; but its contents are-one plate and twothirds of another, both very dusty from long disuse; two or three rusty odd knives and forks, the forks usually short in one prong, and pointless as Hackett's Epigrams; one cracked bason, a cream jug minus handle, and a tea-pot sans nose. use; The walls of his attic are not without their ornaments. On one side, you shall perceive some halfdozen ballads and "last words of notorious malefactors," pasted immovably against the wall by the last tenant, a son of St. Crispin, since hanged; on another side, is the portrait of that most celebrated of all celebrated horses, Skewball, the decoration of a previous tenant, an out-of-place groom. Over the fire-place is a portrait of Shakspeare, framed, but not glazed; in summer, after you have succeeded in brushing off the flies, to gain a look at it, you would suppose it to be a dot engraving, but it is really an aquatint, the dotting is the work of Messieurs the Flies. He had till lately an old bust of "one John Milton, a blind man, who wrote a long poem;" the said Milton has since accidentally lost his nose as well as his eyes; but he con soles himself with its still resembling a poet, and calls it a Davenant. The manner and the occasion of the loss of the said nose are as follows:-it seems that a silly and uninformed mouse, ignorant that he had entered a poet's dormitory, whilst searching about the place with the near-sighted curiosity of a Bankes, was then and there discovered by the only companion of the poet's studies, an elderly and faithful tabby, (the solitary gift of a rich old countess who never offered him a dinner,) who, being much enraged at this gross ignorance of the Mouse, in coming to such a place of starvation, (forgetting that she was herself equally silly,) flew indignantly at the said unwitting Mouse, and in the hurry of her expedition, overturned the head of her master's favorite Milton. A bust of Sappho stands in a nook by his bed-side it was a long time draped by a thick, broad, black cobweb, which having fallen (for cobwebs as well as kingdoms must fall,) upon her temples, she has now not taken the veil, but has had it given her. His library consists of many odd things and much literary lumber. The blank leaf of a copy of the "New Way to Pay Old Debts," is filled with a journal of debts, some of long standing and large amount, contracted before he was known to be a poet, (for who would trust a poet?) his latter debts are small, and are kept on the back of the title-page. Among other items you will find these, which are here quoted, as apt instances of his poverty and his extravagance: I o. To Simon Wildgoose, tailor, for seating -To Mrs. Doublechalk, for cream -To Diana Sbaper, for one month's washing o 1 3 Selina Grafton,* for footing silk stock- 0 3 0 A spinster Lady, of high pretensions but low situation, who carries on the business of stocking-grafting, in a stall "under the Rose," a pot-house in Whitechapel. She is the reputed author of the following sentimental nouvellettes, as she calls them, (as it is conjectured, on account A copy of Thompson's "Castle of Indolence" is much dog's-cared and grease-spotted, from his repeatedly going to sleep over the second canto, which seems to have inspired the indolence it deprecates; the first canto is respectably clean, and its beauties are carefully underlined. A copy of the same author's poem on Liberty," ," with MS. annotations, made to beguile the slow hours, whilst lodging in the Fleet. Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination; much thumbed and read. The covers, title, and preface of Blackmore's short poem " The Creation," the title bearing this motto, "Let there be light, and there was light; the poem gone; seems to have been torn up for kindling his lamp; for he burns oil, as he considers it classical: his real motive is economy. Phillips's 66 Splendid Shilling" (the only one he is at times possessed of) is in a very worn and depreciated state, and not worth sixpence. Shakspeare's Works are in 8 vols. of eight various editions. "Paradise Lost" was borrowed by his nearest and dearest relation, a money-getting uncle; and " Paradise Regained" was mortgaged for a beef-steak at Dolly's chop-house; so that, as he says, Paradise Lost cannot be regained, and Paradise Regained is lost. The "Wealth of Nations" he made over to a wandering Jew-clothier, one of the tribe of Gad, for a pair of appendages to his braces; and a small stereotyped Spenser was, at the same time, transmuted into a great coat. Most of his valuable works may be found in the before-mentioned relative's library, who, as he is merely a moneyed-man, and not a poet, estimates the value of every thing by its appearance (the way of the world); "For what's the worth of any thing, and though he makes a very ostentatious display of books, he never reads deeper into a volume than the title-page. of their brevity,) printed at the Minerva press:-" The Night-light, or the Mysterious Chambermaid," 7 vols.; "The Tattered Shirt, or the Suspicious Washerwoman," 9 vols.; and " The Yawning-Hour: or the Pathetical, Sympathetical, and Peripatetical Patrole," 12 vols.; with many other, but less interesting productions. |