“Now, a Romance, with reading Debauchees,
Rouses their torpid powers when Nature fails;
And all these Legendary Tales
Are, to a worn-out mind, Cantharides.
“But how to cure the evil?” you will say:
“My Recipe is,—laughing it away.
“Lay bare the weak farrago of those men
Who fabricate such visionary schemes,
As if the night-mare rode upon their pen,
And trouble’d all their ink with hideous dreams.