Cries not when his father dies,
'Tis a sign that he had rather
Have a turnip than his father.
As for the poems of Ossian, he made a violent attack upon them in his "Tour to the Western Isles."
Dr. Erasmus Darwin assumed the hopeless task of chaining poetry to the car of science. He was a physician of Derby, and, like Sir Richard Blackmore, "rhymed to the rumbling of his own coach wheels;" for we are told that he wrote his verses as he drove about to his patients. His great poem is the "Botanic Garden," in which he celebrates the loves of the plants, and his "Economy of Vegetation," in which he introduces all sorts of mechanical inventions. Amongst the rest he announces the triumphs of steam in sonorous rhymes—
Soon shall thy arm, unconquered Steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car.
And he celebrates the compass in equally imposing heroics—
Hail, adamantine steel! magnetic lord!
King of the prow, the ploughshare, and the sword!