“I am directed by the editor
To say that lack of space and press of matter
Forbid his using your delightful verses,
Which, therefore, he returns. Believe me still
Very sincerely yours, Nathaniel Pickersgill.”
Now not a little disconsolate, young Mr. Gurney went out into the street, and thought of Shavings as a last chance. Shavings gave a guinea to the best poem on a given subject, and printed some of the others sent in. This week he remembered the subject was a eulogy of General Whitelock. He did not hesitate, therefore, to recast his poem, and to call it a “Threnody” on that commander, neglecting, by a poetic fiction, the fact that he was alive, and even looking well after his eight months of hard work against the Warra-Muggas. He went into the great buildings where Shavings is edited, and saw a young man opening with immense rapidity a hand-barrowful of letters, while a second sorted them with the speed of lightning, and a third tied them into neat bundles of five hundred each, and placed them in pigeon-holes under their respective initial letters.
“Pray, sir,” said Peter to the first of these three men, “what are you doing?” “I am,” replied the functionary, “just finishing my week’s work” (for it was a Saturday morning), “and in the course of these four hours alone I am proud to say that I have opened no less than seven thousand three hundred and two poems on our great Leader, some of which, indeed, have been drawn from the principal English poets, but the greater part of which are, I am glad to say, original.”
Embittered by such an experience, my friend Gurney returned to his home, and wrote that same afternoon the Satire on Modern Literature, in which he introduces his own verses as an example and warning, and on which, as all the world knows, his present fame reposes.
To-day everyone who reads these lines is envious of Mr. Peter Gurney’s fame. He is the leader of the whole Cobbley school, the master of his own cousin, Mr. Peter Davey, and without question the model upon which Mr. Henry Hawk, Mr. Daniel Witton, and Mr. John Stuart have framed their poetic manner. He suffered and was strong. He condescended to prose, and kept his verse in reserve. The result no poet can ignore.
I should but mislead the student were I to pretend that Mr. Peter Gurney achieved his present reputation—a reputation perhaps somewhat exaggerated, but based upon real merit and industry—by any spontaneous effort. Hard, regular, unflinching labour in this, as in every other profession, is the condition of success. But the beginner may say (and with justice), “It is not enough to tell me to work; how should I set about it? What rules should I follow?” Let me pursue my invariable custom, and set down in the simplest and most methodical form the elements of the Short Lyric.