Of the once famous Captain Morris, we read that his poems reached a twenty-fourth edition. But where are they now? His verses were principally Anacreontic; his To my Cup received the gold cup from the Harmonic Society; but they are greatly inferior to Tom Moore's. In Hood's line, however, he was more successful, and his Town and Country might well have been written by that great humorist himself:
Oh, but to hear a milkmaid blithe,
Or early mower whet his scythe
The dewy meads among!
My grass is of that sort, alas!
That makes no hay—called sparrow-grass
By folks of vulgar tongue....
Where are ye, birds that blithely wing
From tree to tree, and gaily sing,
Or mourn in thicket deep?
My cuckoo has some ware to sell,
The watchman is my Philomel,
My blackbird is a sheep!
The above is excellent; nor is the Captain less felicitous in describing the other view of the subject—which was no doubt his own—namely, the disadvantages of a rustic life:
In London I never know what to be at,
Enraptured with this, and transported with that;
. . . .
Your jays and your magpies may chatter on trees,
And whisper soft nonsense in groves, if you please;
But a house is much more to my mind than a tree;
And for groves—oh, a fine grove of chimneys for me....
Then in town let me live and in town let me die,
For in truth I can't relish the country, not I.
If I must have a villa, in London to dwell,
Oh, give me the sweet shady side of Pall-Mall.
It is sad to think that the last line will be almost the only one familiar to our readers, and that the memory of the gallant captain has died away, not indeed 'from all the circle of the hills,' but from the London squares he loved, and which knew him so well.
It is not as a wit that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is chiefly famous, but his Table-talk contains many things that would have made the reputation of a diner-out; sometimes they are metaphorical, as when, upon a friend of Fox's, who would take the very words out of his mouth, and always put himself forward to interpret him, he observed that the man always put him in mind of the steeple of St Martin's on Ludgate Hill, which is constantly getting in the way when you wish to see the dome of St Paul's. Sometimes they are philosophic, as when he remarked that all women past seventy, whom ever he knew, were divided into three classes—1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch. And again, they are sometimes purely witty, as, 'Some men are like musical glasses—to produce their finest tones, you must keep them wet.'
Coleridge has also left some fine definitions, which are only not witty because of their wisdom. He compares a single Thought to a wave of the sea, which takes its form from the waves which precede and follow it; and Experience to the stern-lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.
His epigram on a bad singer is excellent: