But let us wait until some season fit.
My Kentishmen, thy Somertons shall rise,
Their prowess warmer for the cloak of wit,
Again the argent horse shall prance in skies."
An allusion, says Chatterton, to the arms of Kent, a horse salient, argent. As to the cloak of wit, it may possibly be preserved in Somersetshire; but the mantle certainly was not tied as an indefeasible heirloom over the broad shoulders of the county of Kent. No ancient Saxons, or even Britons, ever displayed prowess so stolid as those brave wild-wood savages of Boughton Blean, near Canterbury, who recently fell in battle with her Majesty's 45th regiment, opposing sticks to balls and bayonets, under their doughty leader Sir William Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, Knight of Malta, King of Jerusalem, and much more. And there were other blockheads, substantial dunces, of respectable station in East Kent, among this ignorant and ambitious madman's supporters; men who had been at school to little purpose. Such an insurrection of satyrs, and such a Pan, in the middle of the nineteenth century, within earshot of the bells of Christchurch! But this by the bye.
The next poem is styled English Metamorphosis, by T. Rowley. It consists of eleven stanzas of ten lines each, all fluent and spirited, and some of very superior merit. It is the fable of Sabrina, Milton's "daughter of Locrine," transliquefied to the river Severn, while her mother, Elstrida, was changed to the ridge of stones that rises on either side of it, Vincent's rocks at Clifton, and their enemy, the giant, was transformed to the mountain Snowdon. This giant was a very Enceladus.
"He tore a ragged mountain from the ground;
Hurried up nodding forests to the sky:
Then with a fury that might earth astound,
To middle air he let the mountain fly,