at the time by no means widely known, but was enthusiastically admired by both Aytoun and myself. What these lines were I cannot now be sure, but certainly they were some of the best in the poem. They were too good to appear as a fragment in the paper I was engaged upon, and I set to work to mould them into the form of a complete poem, in which it is now known. It was introduced in the paper thus:—
“There is a peculiar atrocity in the circumstances which gave rise to the following poem, that stirs even the Dead Sea of our sensibilities. The lady appears to have carried on a furious flirtation with the bard—a cousin of her own—which she, naturally perhaps, but certainly cruelly, terminated by marrying an old East Indian nabob, with a complexion like curry powder, innumerable lacs of rupees, and a woful lack of liver. A refusal by one’s cousin is a domestic treason of the most ruthless kind; and, assuming the author’s statement to be substantially correct, we must say that the lady’s conduct was disgraceful. What her sensations must be on reading the following passionate appeal we cannot of course divine; but if one spark of feeling lingers in her bosom, she must, for four-and-twenty hours at least, have little appetite for mulligatawny.”
The reviewer then quotes the poem down to the general commination, ending with
“Cursed be the clerk and parson,—cursed be the whole concern!”
He then resumes his commentary:—
“This sweeping system of anathema may be consonant to what the philosophers call a high and imaginative mood of passion, but it is surely as unjust as any fulminations that ever emanated from the Papal Chair. No doubt Cousin Amy behaved shockingly; but why, on that account, should the Bank of England, incorporated by Royal Charter, or the most respectable practitioner who prepared the settlements, along with his innocent clerk, be handed over to the uncovenanted mercies of the foul fiend? No, no, Smifzer, this will never do! In a more manly strain is what follows.”
The remainder of the poem is then given, ending with,
“Rest thee with thy yellow nabob, spider-hearted Cousin Amy!”
and the critic resumes:—
“Bravo, Smifzer! This is the right sort of thing—no wishy-washy snivelling about a wounded heart and all that kind of stuff, but savage sarcasm, the lava of a volcanic spirit. In a fine prophetic strain is that vision of Amy’s feelings as the inebriated nawab stumbles hazily into the drawing-room, steaming fulsomely of chilma! And that picture of the African jungle, with Smifzer in puris mounted on a high-trotting giraffe, with his twelve dusky brides around him,—Cruikshank alone could do it justice. But the triumph of the poem is in the high-toned sentiment of civilisation and moral duty, which, esteeming ‘the grey barbarian’ lower than the ‘Christian cad,’—and that is low enough in all conscience,—tears the captivating delusions of freedom and polygamy from the poet’s eyes, even when his pulse is throbbing at the wildest, and sends him from the shades of the palm and the orange tree to the advertising columns of the ‘Morning Post.’ This is indeed a great poem, and we need only add that the reader will find something like it in Mr Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall.’ There has been pilfering somewhere; but Messieurs Smifzer and Tennyson must settle it between them.”