Break their necks from Parnassus, or drown in Bordeaux;
And to which of those deaths I am doom’d from on high,
I’m sure of a parson, who’ll teach me to die.
Then who can refuse to accept of a dinner,
Where the host is from Erin—a priest—saint[[30]]—and sinner?
In fact, this same friend of mine, of whose poetry, or rather versification, I have thus given samples to the reader, is a very peculiar personage: bred to a profession which he never followed, with ample means and no occupation, he has arrived at a ripe age without much increasing his stock of wisdom, or at all diminishing that of his peculiarity. He told me, he found his standard relief against ennui was invoking the Muses, which by ransacking his ideas and puzzling his genius, operated as a stimulus to his brain, and prevented that stagnation of the fluids which our ablest nosologists say is so often the inducement to suicide. My friend argues that the inexhaustible variety of passions, propensities, sentiments, and so forth, inherent to the human frame, and which poets (like noblemen’s fools in days of yore) have a license for dressing in all colours as they think proper, affords to the language of poetry a vast superiority over that of prose: which latter being in its nature but a hum-drum concern, is generally expected to be reasonably correct, tolerably intelligible, and moderately decent;—astringent qualifications, which some of our modern poets appear to have very laudably disregarded.
[30]. St. Ambrose.
My friend, however, observed, that he himself was not enabled to take other than a limited advantage of this license—inasmuch as he had been frequently jilted by the Muses, who never would do more than flirt with him; and hence, for want of a sufficient modicum of inspiration, he was generally necessitated to put up with the ordinary subjects of verse—such as epigrams, satires, odes on natal days, epitaphs on lap-dogs and little children, translations of Greek songs that he never saw, and of Italian poetry that had never existed, &c. It was true, he went on to inform me, he had occasionally flown at higher game in the regions of poesy; but, somehow or other, no bookseller would publish his effusions: one said they were too flat; another that they were too elevated; a third characterised them as too wild for the critics; and a fourth pronounced them too tame for the ladies. At length, however, the true state of the matter was candidly developed by a very intelligent presbyterian bookseller in the city, who told my friend that he was quite too late as to poetry, with which the publishers were crammed and the public farcied. Besides, he said, all the poetic stations in any way productive were already occupied:—for instance, a Poet Fitzgerald (whom Lord Byron calls “Hoarse Fitzgerald”) had, ever since the days of the “Rejected Addresses,” been considered as the writer, reciter, and proprietor of the fulsome line of poetry:—the amatory, celestial, and horticultural departments had long been considered the property of Mr. Thomas Moore; and every dactyl or spondee relating to roses, posies, dew-drops and thorns, grapes, lilies, kisses, blisses, blushes, angels, &c. would be considered as gross plagiarism, emanating from any other pen than that of our justly celebrated lyrist; while, as to historic or Caledonian poetry, Sir Walter Scott had not left an idea unappropriated for any fresh penman: he had raised an obscure people to eternal celebrity, by recording their murders in English versification; and by his “Battle of Waterloo” had proved that his own Muse, in the department of slaughter, was in a very languishing state, probably owing to the extraordinary fatigue she had previously undergone.