The following is pointed, and felicitously expressed:—
"Then glide down Grub Street, fasting and forgot,
Laugh'd into Lethe by some quaint Review,
Whose wit is never troublesome till—true."
Of the graver parts, the annexed is a favourable specimen:—
"New words find credit in these latter days,
If neatly grafted on a Gallic phrase:
What Chaucer, Spenser, did, we scarce refuse
To Dryden's or to Pope's maturer muse.
If you can add a little, say why not,
As well as William Pitt and Walter Scott,
Since they, by force of rhyme, and force of lungs,
Enrich'd our island's ill-united tongues?
'Tis then, and shall be, lawful to present
Reforms in writing as in parliament.
"As forests shed their foliage by degrees,
So fade expressions which in season please;
And we and ours, alas! are due to fate,
And works and words but dwindle to a date.
Though, as a monarch nods and commerce calls,
Impetuous rivers stagnate in canals;
Though swamps subdued, and marshes drain'd sustain
The heavy ploughshare and the yellow grain;
And rising ports along the busy shore
Protect the vessel from old Ocean's roar—
I quote what follows chiefly for the sake of the note attached to it:—
"Satiric rhyme first sprang from selfish spleen.
You doubt?—See Dryden, Pope, St. Patrick's Dean.[8]
"Blank verse is now with one consent allied
To Tragedy, and rarely quits her side;
Though mad Almanzor rhymed in Dryden's days,
No sing-song hero rants in modern plays;—
While modest Comedy her verse foregoes
For jest and pun in very middling prose.
Not that our Bens or Beaumonts show the worse,
Or lose one point because they wrote in verse;
But so Thalia pleases to appear,—
Poor virgin!—damn'd some twenty times a year!"