Hold Pegasus in hand—control
A vein for ornament ensnaring,
Simplicity is still the soul
Of all that Time deems worth the sparing.
Long lays are not a lively sport,
Reduce your own to half a quarter,
Unless your Public thinks them short,
Posterity will cut them shorter.
I look on Bards who whine for praise,
With feelings of profoundest pity:
They hunger for the Poets' bays
And swear one's spiteful when one's witty.
The critic's lot is passing hard—
Between ourselves, I think reviewers,
When called to truss a crowing bard,
Should not be sparing of the skewers.
We all—the foolish and the wise—
Regard our verse with fascination,
Through asinine paternal eyes,
And hues of Fancy's own creation;
Then pray, Sir, pray, excuse a queer
And sadly self-deluded rhymer,
Who thinks his beer (the smallest beer!)
Has all the gust of alt hochheimer.
Dear Bard, the Muse is such a minx,
So tricksy, it were wrong to let her
Rest satisfied with what she thinks
Is perfect: try and teach her better.
And if you only use, perchance,
One half the pains to learn that we, Sir,
Still use to hide our ignorance—
How very clever you will be, Sir!
NOTES.
Note to "A Human Skull."
"In our last month's Magazine you may remember there were some verses about a portion of a skeleton. Did you remark how the poet and present proprietor of the human skull at once settled the sex of it, and determined off-hand that it must have belonged to a woman? Such skulls are locked up in many gentlemen's hearts and memories. Bluebeard, you know, had a whole museum of them—as that imprudent little last wife of his found out to her cost. And, on the other hand, a lady, we suppose, would select hers of the sort which had carried beards when in the flesh."—The Adventures of Philip on his Way through the World. Cornhill Magazine, January, 1861.