A poem upon Windsor Castle, half ludicrous and half solemn, appears, from the many experiments which he made upon it, to have cost him considerable trouble. The Castle, he says,
"Its base a mountain, and itself a rock,
In proud defiance of the tempests' rage,
Like an old gray-hair'd veteran stands each shock—
The sturdy witness of a nobler age."
He then alludes to the "cockney" improvements that had lately taken place, among which the venerable castle appears, like
"A helmet on a Macaroni's head—
Or like old Talbot, turn'd into a fop,
With coat embroider'd and scratch wig at top."
Some verses, of the same mixed character, on the short duration of life and the changes that death produces, thus begin:—
"Of that same tree which gave the box,
Now rattling in the hand of FOX,
Perhaps his coffin shall be made.—"
He then rambles into prose, as was his custom, on a sort of knight- errantry after thoughts and images:—"The lawn thou hast chosen for thy bridal shift—thy shroud may be of the same piece. That flower thou hast bought to feed thy vanity—from the same tree thy corpse may be decked. Reynolds shall, like his colors, fly; and Brown, when mingled with the dust, manure the grounds he once laid out. Death is life's second childhood; we return to the breast from whence we came, are weaned,…."
There are a few detached lines and couplets of a poem, intended to ridicule some fair invalid, who was much given to falling in love with her physicians:—
"Who felt her pulse, obtained her heart."
The following couplet, in which he characterizes an amiable friend of his, Dr. Bain, with whom he did not become acquainted till the year 1792, proves these fragments to have been written after that period:—