And convoys him to darkness so drear.
Then sad at the door of my love I lay,
Slumbering the six months all away.”
Horace sang something about lying exposed to the cold and rain at the door of his beloved, and vowed he would not do it again. There is certainly a distance of something beside two thousand years between Horace and the gentleman who wrote the above lines.
There is a really astonishing poem entitled “The Lights of Asheaton,” which, happily, everyone can purchase for a ha’penny. It is the composition of a recent Irish poet of the same class as Mr. John Morgan, and is a dissuasive against Protestantism. What the “Lights” of Asheaton are does not transpire. It opens thus:—
“You Muses now aid me in admonishing Paganism,
The new Lights of Asheaton, whose fate I do deplore.
From innocence and reason they are led to condemnation,
Their fate they’ve violated, the occasion of their woe.”
After some wonderful lines that we hardly like to quote, as savouring of irreverence—though that was far from the poet’s intention—he assures us:—