To name his works,
"Wat Tyler,"
"Waterloo."

He had written praises of a regicide;

He had written praises of all kings whatever; He had written for republics far and wide,

And then against them bitterer than ever; For pantisocracy he once had cried

OG.

SHADWELL, THE DRAMATIST.

Then grew a hearty anti-jacobin,

A monstrous mass of foul, corrupted matter,

his skin.

He had sung against all battles, and again
In their high praise and glory; he had called
Reviewing "the ungentle craft," and then

Become as base a critic as e'er crawled, -
Fed, paid, and pampered by the very men
By whom his muse and morals had been mauled;

He had written much blank verse, and blanker prose,

And more of both than anybody knows.

SPORUS, LORD HERVEY.

66

BYRON.

FROM THE PROLOGUE TO THE SATIRES." "9

LET Sporus tremble. —A. What? that thing of silk,

Sporus, that mere white curd of asses' milk?
Satire of sense, alas ! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

P. Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys:
So well-bred spaniels civilly delight

In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,
As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid impotence he speaks,
And, as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks,
Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad,

Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,
In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies,
Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies;
His wit all seesaw, between that and this.
Now high, now low, now master up, now miss,
And he himself one vile antithesis.
Amphibious thing! that, acting either part,
The trifling head, or the corrupted heart,
Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.
Eve's tempter thus the rabbins have exprest,
A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest;
Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.

ALEXANDER POPE.

The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull, With this prophetic blessing, - "Be thou dull; Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight Fit for thy bulk; do anything but write: Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men; A strong nativity but for the pen ! Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink": Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink, I see, I see, 't is counsel given in vain, For treason botched in rhyme will be thy bane; Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck, 'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck; Why should thy metre good King David blast? A psalm of his will surely be thy last. A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull To die for faction is a common evil, For writing treason and for writing dull. But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil. JOHN DRYDEN.

ODE TO RAE WILSON, ESQUIRE.
A WANDERER, Wilson, from my native land,
Remote, O Rae, from godliness and thee,
Where rolls between us the eternal sea,
Besides some furlongs of a foreign sand,
Beyond the broadest Scotch of London Wall,
Beyond the loudest Saint that has a call,
Across the wavy waste between us stretched,
A friendly missive warns me of a stricture,
Wherein my likeness you have darkly etched ;
And though I have not seen the shadow sketched,
Thus I remark prophetic on the picture.

I guess the features: - in a line to paint
Their moral ugliness, I'm not a saint.
Not one of those self-constituted saints,
Quacks not physicians in the cure of souls,
Censors who sniff out moral taints,

Of such a character no single trace
Exists, I know, in my fictitious face.
There wants a certain cast about the eye;
A certain lifting of the nose's tip;
A certain curling of the nether lip,

In scorn of all that is, beneath the sky;
In brief, it is an aspect deleterious,
A face decidedly not serious,

A face profane, that would not do at all
To make a face at Exeter Hall,

That Hall where bigots rant and cant and pray,
And laud each other face to face,
Till every farthing-candle ray

Conceives itself a great gaslight of grace!

"Within the limits of becoming mirth";
No solemn sanctimonious face I pull,
Nor think I'm pious when I'm only bilious,
Nor study in my sanctum supercilious
To frame a Sabbath Bill or forge a Bull.
I pray for grace, - repent each sinful act,
Peruse, but underneath the rose, my Bible;
And love my neighbor far too well, in fact,
To call and twit him with a godly tract
That's turned by application to a libel.
My heart ferments not with the bigot's leaven,
All creeds I view with toleration thorough.
And have a horror of regarding heaven
As anybody's rotten borough.

That must be lashed by law, wherever found,
And driven to church as to the parish pound.
I do confess, without reserve or wheedle,
I view that grovelling idea as one
Worthy some parish clerk's ambitious son,
A charity-boy who longs to be a beadle.
On such a vital topic sure 't is odd

How much a man can differ from his neighbor;
One wishes worship freely given to God,
Another wants to make it statute-labor,
The broad distinction in a line to draw,
As means to lead us to the skies above,
You say,
- Sir Andrew and his love of law,
And I, the Saviour with his law of love.

Spontaneously to God should tend the soul,
Like the magnetic needle to the Pole;
But what were that intrinsic virtue worth,
Suppose some fellow, with more zeal than knowl
edge

Fresh from St. Andrew's college,
Should nail the conscious needle to the north?
I do confess that I abhor and shrink
From schemes, with a religious willy-nilly,
That frown upon St. Giles's sins, but blink
The peccadilloes of all Piccadilly, —
My soul revolts at such bare hypocrisy,
And will not, dare not, fancy in accord
The Lord of Hosts with an exclusive lord
Of this world's aristocracy.

It will not own a notion so unholy
As thinking that the rich by easy trips
May go to heaven, whereas the poor and lowly
Must work their passage, as they do in ships.

One place there is, beneath the burial-sod,
Where all mankind are equalized by death;
Another place there is, - the fane of God,
Where all are equal who draw living breath;
Juggle who will elsewhere with his own soul,
Playing the Judas with a temporal dole,
He who can come beneath that awful cope,
In the dread presence of a Maker just,
Who metes to every pinch of human dust
One even measure of immortal hope,
He who can stand within that holy door,
With soul unbowed by that pure spirit-level,
And frame unequal laws for rich and poor,
Might sit for Hell, and represent the Devil!

The humble records of my life to search,

-

I have not herded with mere pagan beasts;
But sometimes I have "sat at good men's feasts,"
And I have been "where bells have knolled to
church."

Dear bells how sweet the sounds of village bells
When on the undulating air they swim!

Now loud as welcomes! faint, now, as farewells!

And trembling all about the breezy dells,
As fluttered by the wings of cherubim.
Meanwhile the bees are chanting a low hymn;
And, lost to sight, the ecstatic lark above
Sings, like a soul beatified, of love,

With, now and then, the coo of the wild pigeon;-
O pagans, heathens, infidels, and doubters!
If such sweet sounds can't woo you to religion,
Will the harsh voices of church cads and touters?
A man may cry Church! Church! at every word,
With no more piety than other people,
A daw's not reckoned a religious bird
Because it keeps a-cawing from a steeple ;
The Temple is a good, a holy place,
But quacking only gives it an ill savor,
While saintly mountebanks the porch disgrace,
And bring religion's self into disfavor!

Church is "

'a little heaven below,

I have been there and still would go,' Yet I am none of those who think it odd

A man can pray unbidden from the cassock,
And, passing by the customary hassock,
Kneel down remote upon the simple sod,
And sue in forma pauperis to God.

As for the rest, intolerant to none,
Whatever shape the pious rite may bear,
Even the poor pagan's homage to the sun
I would not harshly scorn, lest even there
I spurned some elements of Christian prayer,
An aim, though erring, at a "world ayont,"
Acknowledgment of good, of man's futility,
A sense of need, and weakness, and indeed
That very thing so many Christians want,
Humility.

I have not sought, 't is true, the Holy Land, As full of texts as Cuddie Headrigg's mother, The Bible in one hand,

And my own commonplace-book in the other;
But you have been to Palestine — alas !
Some minds improve by travel; others, rather,
Resemble copper wire or brass,
Which gets the narrower by going farther!

Worthless are all such pilgrimages — very !
If Palmers at the Holy Tomb contrive
The human heats and rancor to revive
That at the Sepulchre they ought to bury.
A sorry sight it is to rest the eye on,
To see a Christian creature graze at Sion,
Then homeward, of the saintly pasture full,
Rush bellowing, and breathing fire and smoke,
At crippled Papistry to butt and poke,
Exactly as a skittish Scottish bull

Hunts an old woman in a scarlet cloke.

Say, was it to my spirit's gain or loss,
One bright and balmy morning, as I went
From Liege's lovely environs to Ghent,
If hard by the wayside I found a cross,
That made me breathe a prayer upon the spot,
While Nature of herself, as if to trace
The emblem's use, had trailed around its base
The blue significant Forget-Me-Not?
Methought, the claims of Charity to urge
More forcibly along with Faith and Hope,
The pious choice had pitched upon the verge
Of a delicious slope,

Giving the eye much variegated scope !
"Look round," it whispered,

rare,

on that prospect

Those vales so verdant, and those hills so blue;
Enjoy the sunny world, so fresh and fair,
But" (how the simple legend pierced me through!)
"PRIEZ POUR LES MALHEUREUX."

With sweet kind natures, as in honeyed cells, Religion lives, and feels herself at home;

But only on a formal visit dwells

Where wasps instead of bees have formed the comb.

Shun pride, O Rae! - whatever sort beside
You take in lieu, shun spiritual pride!
A pride there is of rank, a pride of birth,
A pride of learning, and a pride of purse,
A London pride, -in short, there be on earth
A host of prides, some better and some worse;
But of all prides, since Lucifer's attaint,
The proudest swell's a self-elected Saint.

To picture that cold pride so harsh and hard,
Fancy a peacock in a poultry-yard.
Behold him in conceited circles sail,
Strutting and dancing, and now planted stiff,
In all his pomp of pageantry, as if

He felt "the eyes of Europe on his tail!
As for the humble breed retained by man,
He scorns the whole domestic clan,
He bows, he bridles,

He wheels, he sidles,
As last, with stately dodgings in a corner,
He pens a simple russet hen, to scorn her
Full in the blaze of his resplendent fan!

"Look here," he cries, (to give him words,) "Thou feathered clay, thou scum of birds!"Flirting the rustling plumage in her eyes, "Look here, thou vile predestined sinner, Doomed to be roasted for a dinner, Behold these lovely variegated dyes! These are the rainbow colors of the skies, That heaven has shed upon me con amore, A Bird of Paradise ?- -a pretty story! I am that Saintly Fowl, thou paltry chick ! Look at my crown of glory!

Thou dingy, dirty, dabbled, draggled jill !'
And off goes Partlett, wriggling from a kick,
With bleeding scalp laid open by his bill!

That little simile exactly paints
How sinners are despised by saints.

By saints! the Hypocrites that ope heaven's

door

Obsequious to the sinful man of riches;
But put the wicked, naked, barelegged poor

In parish stocks, instead of breeches.

Thrice blessed, rather, is the man with whom
The gracious prodigality of nature,
The balm, the bliss, the beauty, and the bloom,
The bounteous providence in every feature,
Recall the good Creator to his creature,
Making all earth a fane, all heaven its dome !

Once on a time a certain English lass
Was seized with symptoms of such deep decline,
Cough, hectic flushes, every evil sign,
That, as their wont is at such desperate pass,
The doctors gave her over-to an ass.

Accordingly, the grisly Shade to bilk,
Each morn the patient quaffed a frothy bowl
Of asinine new milk,

Robbing a shaggy suckling of a foal,
Which got proportionably spare and skinny;
Meanwhile the neighbors cried, "Poor Mary
Ann!

She can't get over it! she never can!
When, lo! to prove each prophet was a ninny,
The one that died was the poor wet-nurse Jenny.