The concluding couplet of the following lines is amusingly characteristic of that mixture of fun and bitterness with which their author sometimes spoke in conversation;—so much so, that those who knew him might almost fancy they hear him utter the words:—
"But every thing has faults, nor is't unknown
That harps and fiddles often lose their tone,
And wayward voices at their owner's call,
With all his best endeavours, only squall;
Dogs blink their covey, flints withhold the spark,
And double barrels (damn them) miss their mark!"[11]
One more passage, with the humorous note appended to it, will complete the whole amount of my favourable specimens:—
"And that's enough—then write and print so fast,—
If Satan take the hindmost, who'd be last?
They storm the types, they publish one and all,
They leap the counter, and they leave the stall:—
Provincial maidens, men of high command,
Yea, baronets, have ink'd the bloody hand!
Cash cannot quell them—Pollio play'd this prank:
(Then Phoebus first found credit in a bank;)
Not all the living only, but the dead
Fool on, as fluent as an Orpheus' head!
Damn'd all their days, they posthumously thrive,
Dug up from dust, though buried when alive!
Reviews record this epidemic crime,
Those books of martyrs to the rage for rhyme
From these select specimens, which comprise, altogether, little more than an eighth of the whole poem, the reader may be enabled to form some notion of the remainder, which is, for the most part, of a very inferior quality, and, in some parts, descending to the depths of doggerel. Who, for instance, could trace the hand of Byron in such "prose, fringed with rhyme," as the following?—
"Peace to Swift's faults! his wit hath made them pass
Unmatch'd by all, save matchless Hudibras,
Whose author is perhaps the first we meet
Who from our couplet lopp'd two final feet;
Nor less in merit than the longer line
This measure moves, a favourite of the Nine.
"Though at first view, eight feet may seem in vain
Form'd, save in odes, to bear a serious strain,
Yet Scott has shown our wondering isle of late
This measure shrinks not from a theme of weight,