“But,” rejoined my friend, “modern sentiment, which brings all these matters into collision, had not then been invented: now we can have both in one lot.”
Finally, we determined to consult Mr. Thomas Moore himself upon this most interesting consideration, agreeing that nobody could possibly understand such a refined subject so well as the person who wrote a book about it: we therefore proceeded (as I shall now do) to the next stage of years and of poetry.
The poet and lover was soon fixed at the university of Oxford, where he shortly made fast acquaintance with a couple of hot young Irishmen, who lost no time in easing him of the dregs of his sentimentality, and convinced him clearly that no rational man should ever be in love except when he is drunk, in which case it signifies little whom he falls in love with. Thus our youth soon forgot the parsonage, and grew enamoured of the bottle: but having some lees of poetry still remaining within him, the classics and the wine set them a fermenting; and he now wrote drinking-songs, hunting-songs, boating-songs, satires on the shopkeepers’ daughters, and lampoons on the fellows of Jesus and Brazen-nose; answered letters in verse; and, in a word, turned out what the lads called a genius.
The reverend private tutor of these young Irishmen wrote one day a letter to our poet in verse, inviting him to “meet at dinner a few fellow-countrymen, just arrived.” The tutor was a hard-going old parson, fond of wine and versification, who had been sent over from Ireland by the father of the two young men above alluded to, with direction to “take care that the lads did not fall into the d——d English morals, which would soon turn them into snow-balls, and disqualify them ever after from living in their own proper country and natural society.” These instructions the tutor faithfully acted up to; and the young poet very much amused the whole party by his humour and turn for rhyming; and was compelled to swear that he would pay them a visit, for a couple of years, near Belturbet in Ireland, where they would show him what living was. Their father was himself dotingly fond of poetry and the bag-pipes; and was induced to send them to Oxford only to please their mother’s brother, who was, most unfortunately, an Englishman.
My friend’s reply to the parson’s invitation was also in verse, and ran as follows: it was not amiss for a young tipster, and smacked, in some degree, both of Oxford and “Belturbet.”
Please your reverence,—
When parsons and poets their functions unite,
And court the old Muses to sing “an invite,”
The profane and the sacred connected we find,