And marked thy humble hope, thy pious fear.—
O! when this frame, which yet, while life remained,
Thy duteous love, with trembling hand, sustained,
Dissolves (as soon it must) may that Bless’d Pow’r
Who beamed on thine, illume my parting hour!
So shall I greet thee, where no ills annoy,
And what was sown in grief, is reap’d in joy;
Where worth, obscured below, bursts into day,
And those are paid, whom Earth could never pay.’[[75]]
It seems then, you can extract the pathetic though not the humorous, out of persons who are not ‘gentlemen or gentlewomen.’ It was the amiable weakness thus noticed, that made you take such pains to do away the suspicion of a particular partiality for low people. You could not afford ‘the frail memorial’ of your private virtues to get beyond the inscription on a tomb-stone, or the poet’s corner of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The natural sympathies of the undoubted translator of Juvenal might be a prejudice to the official character of the anonymous editor of the Quarterly Review. You were determined to hear no more of this epitaph, and ‘other such dulcet diseases’[[76]] of yours.—You perhaps recollect, Sir, that the columns of the Examiner newspaper, which gave you such a premature or posthumous credit for some ‘compunctious visitings of nature,’ also contained the first specimen of the Story of Rimini. You seem to have said on that occasion with Iago, ‘You are well tuned now,—but I’ll set down the pegs that make this music, as honest as I am.’—That Mr. Hunt should have supposed it possible for a moment, that a government automaton was accessible to anything like a liberal concession, is one of those deplorable mistakes which constantly put men who are ‘made of penetrable stuff,’ at the mercy of those who are not. The amiable and elegant author of Rimini thought he was appealing to something human in your breast, in the recollection of your ‘Dear Ann Davies’; he touched the springs, and found them ‘stuffed with paltry blurred sheets’ of the Quarterly Review, with notes from Mr. Murray, and directions how to proceed with the author, from the Admiralty Scribe. You retorted his sympathy with ‘one whom earth could never pay,’ by laughing to scorn his honest laborious ‘tub-tumbling viragos,’ whose red elbows and coarse fists prevented so inelegant a contrast to the pining and sickly form whose loss you deplore. Is there anything in your nature and disposition that draws to it only the infirm in body and oppressed in mind; or that, while it clings to power for support, seeks consolation in the daily soothing spectacle of physical malady or morbid sensibility? The air you breathe seems to infect; and your friendship to be a canker-worm that blights its objects with unwholesome and premature decay. You are enamoured of suffering, and are at peace only with the dead.—Even if you had been accessible to remorse as a political critic, Mr. Hunt had committed himself with you (past forgiveness) in your character of a pretender to poetry about town. The following lines in his Feast of the Poets, must have occasioned you ‘a few mirthful sensations,’ which you have not yet acknowledged, except by deeds.—