Who oft o’er his grave in true sorrow would bend;
And when dying, thus feebly was heard the poor swain,
“Oh! bury me, neighbour, beside my old friend.”
Is not that a genuine piece of pure pastoral writing—grave and truthful? Of his gay writing there is more than enough, and much of it is as unfit for modern quotation as some of the classics in whom he delighted. As Thomas Bewick could not be persuaded that anything he actually saw was unsuited for pictorial representation, however vulgar, if the drawing were true to nature, so Pindar shocks our sense of propriety continually and without apology. He could, however, play on the whole gamut of the soul’s passions, as witness his touching threnody on “Julia, or the Victim of Love,” in his Smiles and Tears, a piece no man without a tender heart could ever have written.
Many jocular little pieces like the following are strewn among his verses:—
ODE (Introductory).
Simplicity, I dote upon thy tongue;
And thee, O white-rob’d Truth, I’ve reverenced long—
I’m fond too of that flashy varlet wit,
Who skims earth, sea, heav’n, hell, existence o’er