Along thy sprucest bookshelves shine
The works thou deemest most divine—
The 'Art of Cookery', and mine,
My Murray.
Tours, Travels, Essays, too, I wist,
And Sermons, to thy mill bring grist;
And then thou hast the 'Navy List',
My Murray.
And heaven forbid I should conclude
Without 'the Board of Longitude',
Although this narrow paper would,
My Murray.
G. Gordon, Lord Byron.
TO THE EDITOR OF 'THE EVERY-DAY BOOK'
I like you, and your book, ingenuous Hone!
In whose capacious all-embracing leaves
The very marrow of tradition's shown;
And all that history—much that fiction—weaves.
By every sort of taste your work is graced.
Vast stores of modern anecdote we find,
With good old story quaintly interlaced—
The theme as various as the reader's mind.
Rome's life-fraught legends you so truly paint—
Yet kindly,—that the half-turned Catholic
Scarcely forbears to smile at his own Saint,
And cannot curse the candid heretic.
Rags, relics, witches, ghosts, fiends, crowd your page;
Our father's mummeries we well-pleased behold,
And, proudly conscious of a purer age,
Forgive some fopperies in the times of old.
Verse-honouring Phoebus, Father of bright Days,
Must needs bestow on you both good and many,
Who, building trophies of his Children's praise,
Run their rich Zodiac through, not missing any.