Blanch with surprise the sons of Ethiopian land."
Another sonnet on Luis de Bavia's Historia Pontifical is presented in this fashion:—"This poem which Bavia has now offered to the world, if not tied up in numbers, yet is filed down into a good arrangement, and licked into shape by learning; is a cultivated history, whose grey-headed style, though not metrical, is combed out, and robs three pilots of the sacred bark from time, and rescues them from oblivion. But the pen that thus immortalises the heavenly turnkeys on the bronzes of its history is not a pen, but the key of ages. It opens to their names, not the gates of failing memory, which stamps shadows on masses of foam, but those of immortality." This, again, is translation of a kind—of a kind very current among fourth-form boys, and, perpetrated by such an excellent scholar as Ticknor, is to be accepted as intentional caricature of the original. Once more the loyal Churton shall elucidate his author:—
"This offering to the world by Bavia brought
Is poesy, by numbers unconfined;
Such order guides the master's march of mind,
Such skill refines the rich-drawn ore of thought.
The style, the matter, gray experience taught,
Art's rules adorn'd what metre might not bind:
The tale hath baffled time, that thief unkind,
And from Oblivion's bonds with toil hath brought