Pony Lost.
On Feb. 21st, 1822, this devil bade me adieu.
“Lost, stolen, or astray, not the least doubt but run away, a mare pony that is all bay,—if I judge pretty nigh, it is about eleven hands high; full tail and mane, a pretty head and frame; cut on both shoulders by the collar, not being soft nor hollow; it is about five years old, which may be easily told; for spirit and for speed, the devil cannot her exceed.”
An excellent specimen of this kind of literary work is to be found in J. Russell Lowell’s “Fable for Critics,” of which the title-page and preface are written in this fashion, and there is here given an extract from the latter:
“Having scrawled at full gallop (as far as that goes) in a style that is neither good verse nor bad prose, and being a person whom nobody knows, some people will say I am rather more free with my readers than it is becoming to be, that I seem to expect them to wait on my leisure in following wherever I wander at pleasure,—that, in short, I take more than a young author’s lawful ease, and laugh in a queer way so like Mephistopheles, that the public will doubt, as they grope through my rhythm, if in truth I am making fun at them or with them.
“So the excellent Public is hereby assured that the sale of my book is already secured. For there is not a poet throughout the whole land, but will purchase a copy or two out of hand, in the fond expectation of being amused in it, by seeing his betters cut up and abused in it. Now, I find, by a pretty exact calculation, there are something like ten thousand bards in the nation, of that special variety whom the Review and Magazine critics call lofty and true, and about thirty thousand (this tribe is increasing) of the kinds who are termed full of promise and pleasing. The public will see by a glance at this schedule, that they cannot expect me to be over-sedulous about courting them, since it seems I have got enough fuel made sure of for boiling my pot.
“As for such of our poets as find not their names mentioned once in my pages, with praises or blames, let them send in their cards, without further delay, to my friend G. P. Putnam, Esquire, in Broadway, where a list will be kept with the strictest regard to the day and the hour of receiving the card. Then, taking them up as I chance to have time (that is, if their names can be twisted in rhyme), I will honestly give each his proper position, at the rate of one author to each new edition. Thus, a premium is offered sufficiently high (as the Magazines say when they tell their best lie) to induce bards to club their resources and buy the balance of every edition, until they have all of them fairly been run through the mill.” &c. &c.
That which is considered, however, one of the best of Prose Poems is the following, which appeared originally in Fraser’s Magazine, and will also be found in Maclise and Maginn’s “Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters,”[11] being part of the introductory portion of a notice of the late Earl of Beaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, and known at the time as an aspirant to literary and political fame:
“O Reader dear! do pray look here, and you will spy the curly hair, and forehead fair, and nose so high, and gleaming eye, of Benjamin D’Is-ra-e-li, the wondrous boy who wrote Alroy in rhyme and prose, only to show how long ago victorious Judah’s lion-banner rose. In an earlier day he wrote Vivian Grey—a smart enough story, we must say, until he took his hero abroad, and trundled him over the German road; and taught him there not to drink beer, and swallow schnapps, and pull mädschen’s caps, and smoke the cigar and the meersham true, in alehouse and lusthaus all Fatherland through, until all was blue, but talk secondhand that which, at the first, was never many degrees from the worst,—namely, German cant and High Dutch sentimentality, maudlin metaphysics, and rubbishing reality. But those who would find how Vivian wined with the Marchioness of Puddledock, and other great grandees of the kind, and how he talked æsthetic, and waxed eloquent and pathetic, and kissed his Italian puppies of the greyhound breed, they have only to read—if the work be still alive—Vivian Grey, in volumes five.
“As for his tentative upon the Representative, which he and John Murray got up in a very great hurry, we shall say nothing at all, either great or small; and all the wars that thence ensued, and the Moravian’s deadly feud; nor much of that fine book, which is called ‘the Young Duke,’ with his slippers of velvet blue, with clasps of snowy-white hue, made out of the pearl’s mother, or some equally fine thing or other; and ‘Fleming’ (Contarini), which will cost ye but a guinea; and ‘Gallomania’ (get through it, can you?) in which he made war on (assisted by a whiskered baron—his name was Von Haber, whose Germanical jabber, Master Ben, with ready pen, put into English smart and jinglish), King Philippe and his court; and many other great works of the same sort—why, we leave them to the reader to peruse; that is to say, if he should choose.