Anacreon, Sappho, and my great old cousin;
On thee shall rising generations stare,
That come to Kingsbridge and to Dodbrook fair,
For such thy history and mine shall learn;
Like Alexander shall they ev’ry one
Heave a deep sigh, and say, since Peter’s gone,
With rev’rence let us look upon his Barn.
His allusions to Pindar the Greater make one fear that he has paid an ill compliment to his old friends, and that in his choice of a nom de plume he has allowed, as in many other instances, his merciless satire to overcome his evenness of judgment. Like his namesake, he turned from the country to find his laurels in the town, and there the parallel ends. It is not true that the people of South Devon, who singularly combine agricultural skill with good seamanship, so that they handle equally well the plough and the oar, are open to any implication of special dulness.
There is little in common between the two Pindars, the ancient and the modern. Peter displayed great skill of a kind in his versification, but no one can say it was to any extent truly lyrical. We cannot imagine the people singing his productions. They were popular, readable, pungent, savoury (too much so by a long way), but certainly not lyrical, for he had not the singer’s heart or the singer’s sweetness. Beyond the attraction of “apt alliteration’s artful aid,” we can see no great reason why he should have gone so far as Thebes in 540 B.C. to appropriate the name of that ancient singer of triumphal hymns for classic warriors.
There is a pretty story of the older Pindar that a swarm of bees lighted on his cradle in his infancy and left honey on his lips; but we fear in the case of our hero they were wasps that came, and that they left some of the caustic venom of their stings.