"Each with some wondrous gift approach'd the Power,
A nest, a toad, a fungus, or a flower."
A florist lodges a heavy complaint against an entomologist. The singular beauty of the pleading on both sides has often been noticed, and by the best critics, from Thomas Gray to Thomas De Quincey.
"The first thus open'd: Hear thy suppliant's call,
Great Queen, and common mother of us all!
Fair from its humble bed I rear'd this flow'r,
Suckl'd, and cheer'd with air, and sun, and show'r,
Soft on the paper ruff its leaves I spread,
Bright with the gilded button tipt its head.
Then thron'd in glass, and nam'd it Caroline:
Each maid cry'd, Charming; and each youth, Divine!
Did Nature's pencil ever blend such rays,
Such very'd light in one promiscuous blaze?
Now prostrate! dead! behold that Caroline:
No maid cries charming! and no youth divine!
And lo the wretch! whose vile, whose insect lust
Laid this gay daughter of the Spring in dust,
Oh punish him, or to th' Elysian shades
Dismiss my soul, where no carnation fades.
He ceas'd, and wept. With innocence of mien
The accus'd stood forth, and thus address'd the Queen:
"Of all th' enamel'd race, whose silv'ry wing
Waves to the tepid zephyrs of the spring,
Or swims along the fluid atmosphere,
Once brightest shin'd this child of heat and air.
I saw, and started from its vernal bow'r
The rising game, and chas'd from flow'r to flow'r.
It fled, I follow'd, now in hope, now pain;
It stopt, I stopt; it mov'd, I mov'd again.
At last it fixed, 'twas on what plant it pleas'd,
And where it fixed, the beauteous bird I seiz'd:
Rose, or carnation, was below my care;
I meddle, Goddess! only in my sphere.
I tell the naked feet without disguise,
And, to excuse it, need but show the prize;
Whose spoils this paper offers to our eye,
Fair ev'n death! this peerless butterfly."
The mighty mother cannot find it in her heart to pronounce a decision which must aggrieve one of such a devoted pair. She extols them both, and makes over to their joint care and tuition the fainéants aforesaid. The subject leads her into a more serious strain of thinking. There is an evident danger; for the studies which she recommends are studies of nature, and the study of nature tends to rise out of nature. The goddess, accordingly, is strenuous in cautioning her followers to keep within the pale of trifles, and of the sensible. The suggestion of the hazard fires a clerk, a metaphysician, who, on the behalf of the metaphysicians, undertakes for a theology that shall effectually shut out and keep down religion. Gordon, the translator of Tacitus, and publisher of the irreligious "Independent Whig," being mentioned by the orator of the metaphysicians with praise, under the name of Silenus, rises and advances, leading up, apparently, the Young England of the day. He presents them as liberated from priest-craft, and ready for drinking the cup of a "Wizard old," attached to the suite of the goddess. This "Magus" extends to them the cup of self-love.
"Which whoso tastes, forgets his former friends,
Sire, ancestors, Himself."
There is philosophy enough in the last piece of oblivion.
Impudence, pure mild Stupidity, Self-conceit, Interest, the Accomplishment of Singing, under the auspicious smile of the goddess, take possession, sundrily, of her children; and the two great arts of Gastronomia, scientific Eating and Drinking.
The Queen confers her titles and degrees, assisted by the two universities. She then dismisses the assembly with a solemn charge:—