Wielded by knotty arms in Man's despite,
Or on the wings of crashing battle-balls,
Bone-shattering dealers of a thousand wounds,
The roaring heralds of indignant God,
There rapture dwells, and there I too would dwell.'
"Here is power that would furnish forth a whole legion of the poetasters who crawl through our effete literature!" But I cannot pursue these memories. They are too painful. For who speaks of CHEPSTOWE now? Who cares to cumber his bookshelves with the volumes in which this inflated arm-chair prophet of the tin pots delivered his shrieking message? His very name has flickered out; and when I spoke of him the other day, I was asked, by a person of some intelligence, if I referred to CHEPSTOWE who had just made 166 playing cricket for the Gentlemen against the Players. Not even the lion and the lizard keep his courts, and yet JAMSHYD CHEPSTOWE gloried and drank deep in his day. He blustered through many editions, he bellowed his contempt at a shrinking world, he outraged conventionality, he swung himself by the aid of newly-fashioned metres to lofty peaks of poetic daring, and to-day the dust lies thick upon his books, and his name is confounded with that of an eminent cricket-player!
My excellent SWAGGER, it was meanly done. If you meant to wipe him out so swiftly, why did you ever exalt him?
Farewell for a space. I may have to write to you again.
Yours, DIOGENES ROBINSON.