Hyde Parker.
CORONATION LAYS.
(Picked up in the Crowd.)
An article, having the above title, appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, July, 1831. It referred to the forthcoming coronation of King William IV. and Queen Adelaide, which took place on September 8, 1831. The scraps of poetry were supposed to proceed from the pens of Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell, S. T. Coleridge, W. Wordsworth, L.E.L. (Miss Landon), the Rev. G. Crabbe, Thomas Moore, Thomas Hood, and Robert Southey, then Poet Laureate. As the imitations of Scott and Campbell lead the way, the article may as well be inserted here. The little introductory notices alluding to Moore’s well-known love of a Lord, Southey’s objection to write the official odes hitherto expected from the Poet Laureate, &c., sufficiently indicate the authors referred to. Some of the imitations are not very striking, and those on Crabbe and L.E.L. might perhaps have been omitted as possessing little to interest the modern reader. However, the whole of the poetry is given, the comments only having been slightly shortened.
The Lay of the Lost Minstrel.
(Sir Walter Scott.)
[A tall “stalwart figure,” with a good-humoured Scotch face, a sturdy-looking stick, and a style of dress indicative of something between the farmer and the philosopher, should be represented seated upon a pile of novels, marked “fiftieth edition,” writing, with a pen in each hand two volumes at once of a new work—at the same time dictating a third to an amanuensis at his elbow.]
Long years have pass’d, since lyre of mine
Awoke the short and easy line