The Spirit Enters.
Before the starry threshold of Jove's court
My mansion is, where those immortal shapes
Of bright aërial spirits live insphered
In regions mild of calm and serene air,
Amidst th' Hesperian gardens, on whose banks
Bedew'd with nectar and celestial songs,
Eternal roses grow, and hyacinth,
And fruits of golden rind, on whose fair tree
The scaly harness'd dragon ever keeps
His unenchanted eye: around the verge
And sacred limits of this blissful isle,
The jealous ocean, that old river, winds
His far-extended arms, till with steep fall
Half his waste flood the wild Atlantic fills,
And half the slow unfathom'd Stygian pool.
But soft, I was not sent to court your wonder
With distant worlds, and strange removed climes.
Yet thence I come, and oft from thence behold, &c.
Our readers will forgive us for having modernized the spelling. It is the only liberty that we have taken with our great author's magnificent passage.
A Check To Human Pride
It is rather an unpleasant fact, that the ugliest and awkwardest of brute animals have the greatest resemblance to man: the monkey and the bear. The monkey is ugly too, (so we think,) because he is like man—as the bear is awkward, because the cumbrous action of its huge paws seems to be a preposterous imitation of the motions of the human hands. Men and apes are the only animals that have hairs on the under eye-lid. Let kings know this.
[COMIC TALES, Etc.,]
by C. Dibdin the Younger