We cannot forbear adding the beautiful stanzas in pages 166, 167:
"To The Lady Anne Hamilton.
"Too late I staid, forgive the crime,
Unheeded flew the hours;
How noiseless falls the foot of Time,
That only treads on flow'rs!
"What eye with clear account remarks
The ebbing of his glass,
When all its sands are di'mond sparks,
That dazzle as they pass?
"Ah! who to sober measurement
Time's happy swiftness brings,
When birds of Paradise have lent
Their plumage for his wings?"
The far greater part of the volume, however, contains pieces which can be little gratifying to the public:—some are pretty; and all are besprinkled with "gems," and "roses," and "birds," and "diamonds," and such like cheap poetical adornments, as are always to be obtained at no great expense of thought or of metre.—It is happy for the author that these
bijoux
are presented to persons of high degree; countesses, foreign and domestic; "Maids of Honour to Louisa Landgravine of Hesse D'Armstadt;" Lady Blank, and Lady Asterisk, besides—-, and—-, and others anonymous; who are exactly the kind of people to be best pleased with these sparkling, shining, fashionable trifles. We will solace our readers with three stanzas of the soberest of these odes:
"Addressed to Lady Susan Fincastle, now Countess Of Dunmore.
"What ails you, Fancy? you're become
Colder than Truth, than Reason duller!
Your wings are worn, your chirping's dumb,
And ev'ry plume has lost its colour.
"You droop like geese, whose cacklings cease
When dire St. Michael they remember,
Or like some bird who just has heard
That Fin's preparing for September?
"Can you refuse your sweetest spell
When I for Susan's praise invoke you?
What, sulkier still? you pout and swell
As if that lovely name would choke you."
We are to suppose that "Fin preparing for September" is the lady with whose "lovely name" Fancy runs some risk of being "choked;" and, really, if
killing partridges
formed a part of her Ladyship's accomplishments, both "Fancy" and Feeling were in danger of a quinsey. Indeed, the whole of these stanzas are couched in that most exquisite irony, in which Mr. S. has more than once succeeded. All the songs to "persons of quality" seem to be written on that purest model, "the song by a person of quality;" whose stanzas have not been fabricated in vain. This sedulous imitation extends even to the praise of things inanimate:
"When an Eden zephyr hovers
O'er a slumb'ring cherub's lyre,
Or when sighs of seraph lovers
Breathe upon th' unfinger'd wire."