SIGNS OF LOVE, AT OXFORD.
By an Inn-consolable Lover.
She’s as light as the Greyhound, and fair as the Angel;
Her looks than the Mitre more sanctified are;
But she flies like the Roebuck, and leaves me to range ill,
Still looking to her as my true polar Star.
New Inn-ventions I try, with new art to adore,
But my fate is, alas! to be voted a Boar;
My Goats I forsook to contemplate her charms,
And must own she is fit for our noble King’s Arms.
Now Cross’d, and now Jockey’d, now sad, now elate,
The Chequers appear but a map of my fate;
I blush’d like a Blue-cur to send her a Pheasant,
But she call’d me a Turk, and rejected my present;
So I moped to the Barley-mow, griev’d in my mind,
That the Ark from the flood ever rescu’d mankind!
In my dreams Lions roar, and the Green Dragon grins
And fiends rise in shape of the Seven deadly sins.
When I ogle the Bells, should I see her approach,
I skip like a Nag and jump into the Coach.
She is crimson and white, like a Shoulder of Mutton,
Not the red of the Ox was so bright, when first put on:
Like the Hollybush prickles, she scratches my liver,
While I moan, and I die like the Swan by the river!
Prolific Writers.
The copiousness and the multiplicity of the writings of many authors, have shown that too many find a pleasure in the act of composition, which they do not communicate to others. Great erudition and every-day application is the calamity of that voluminous author, who, without good sense, and what is more rare, without that exquisite judgment which we call good taste is always prepared to write on any subject, but at the same time on no one reasonably. We are astonished at the fertility and the size of our own writers of the seventeenth century, when the theological war of words raged, spoiling so many pages and brains. They produced folio after folio, like almanacks. The truth is, that it was then easier to write up to a folio, than in our days to write down to an octavo; for correction, selection, and rejection, were arts as yet unpractised. They went on with their work, sharply or bluntly, like witless mowers, without stopping to whet their scythes. They were inspired by the scribbling demon of that rabbin, who, in his oriental style and mania of volume, exclaimed, that were “the heavens formed of paper, and were the trees of the earth pens, and if the entire sea run ink, these only could suffice” for the monstrous genius he was about to discharge on the world.
WILLIAM PRYNNE.
Prynne seldom dined: every three or four hours he munched a manchet, and refreshed his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant; and when “he was put into this road of writing,” as Anthony à Wood telleth, he fixed on “a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light;” and then, hunger nor thirst did he experience, save that of his voluminous pages. Prynne has written a library, amounting, perhaps, to nearly two hundred books. Our unlucky author, whose life was involved in authorship, and his happiness, no doubt, in the habitual exuberance of his pen, seems to have considered the being debarred from pen, ink, and books, during his imprisonment, as an act more barbarous than the loss of his ears. The extraordinary perseverance of Prynne in this fever of the pen appears in the following title of one of his extraordinary volumes, “Comfortable Cordials against discomfortable Fears of Imprisonment; containing some Latin Verses Sentences, and Texts of Scripture, written by Mr. Wm. Prynne on his Chamber Walls, in the Tower of London, during his Imprisonment there; translated by him into English Verse, 1641.” Prynne literally verified Pope’s description:—
“Is there, who, locked from ink and paper, scrawls,
With desperate charcoal round his darkened walls.”