Statue in his niche—
and with calling him a Stentor, perhaps in the next line: but such unappropriated similies and metaphors could not satisfy the nice taste of our author.
The description of the Lobby also furnishes an opportunity of interspersing a passage of the tender kind, in praise of the Pomona who attends there with oranges. Our poet calls her HUCSTERIA, and, by a dexterous stroke of art, compares her to Shiptonia, whose amours with ROLLO form the third and fourth books of the ROLLIAD.
Behold the lovely wanton, kind and fair,
As bright SHIPTONIA, late thy amorous care!
Mark how her winning smiles, and ’witching eyes,
On yonder unfledg’d orator she tries!
Mark, with what grace she offers to his hand
The tempting orange, pride of China’s land!
This gives rise to a panegyric on the medical virtues of oranges, and an oblique censure on the indecent practice of our young Senators, who come down drunk from the eating-room, to sleep in the gallery.
O! take, wise youth, the’ Hesperian fruit, of use
Thy lungs to cherish with balsamic juice.
With this thy parch’d roof moisten; nor consume
Thy hours and guineas in the eating-room,
Till, full of claret, down with wild uproar
You reel, and, stretch’d along the gallery, snore.
From this the poet naturally slides into a general caution against the vice of drunkenness, which he more particularly enforces, by the instance of Mr. PITT’s late peril, from the farmer at Wandsworth.
Ah! think, what danger on debauch attends:
Let Pitt, once drunk, preach temp’rance to his friends;
How, as he wander’d darkling o’er the plain,
His reason drown’d in JENKINSON’s champaigne,
A rustic’s hand, but righteous fate withstood,
Had shed a Premier’s for a robber’s blood.
We have been thus minute in tracing the transitions in this inimitable passage, as they display, in a superior degree, the wonderful skill of our poet, who could thus bring together an orange-girl, and the present pure and immaculate Minister; a connection, which, it is more than probable, few of our readers would in any wise have suspected.
———————Ex fumo dare lucem
Cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat.