by Byron
Each country book-club bows the knee to Baal,
And, hurling lawful genius from the throne,
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Erects a shrine and idol of its own;
Some leaden calf – but whom it matters not,
From soaring Southey down to grovelling Stott.1
Behold! in various throngs the scribbling crew,
For notice eager, pass in long review:
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Each spurs his jaded Pegasus apace,
And rhyme and blank maintain an equal race;
Sonnets on sonnets crowd, and ode on ode;
And tales of terror jostle on the road;
Immeasurable measures move along;
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For simpering folly loves a varied song,
To strange mysterious dulness still the friend,
Admires the strain she cannot comprehend.
Thus Lays of Minstrels1 – may they be the last! –
On half-strung harps whine mournful to the blast.
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While mountain spirits prate to river sprites,
That dames may listen to the sound at nights;
And goblin brats, of Gilpin Horner’s brood,
Decoy young border-nobles through the wood,
And skip at every step, Lord knows how high,
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And frighten foolish babes, the Lord knows why;
While highborn ladies in their magic cell,
Forbidding knights to read who cannot spell,
Despatch a courier to a wizard’s grave,
And fight with honest men to shield a knave.
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Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan,
The golden-crested haughty Marmion,
Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight,
Not quite a felon, yet but half a knight,
The gibbet or the field prepared to grace;
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A mighty mixture of the great and base.
And think’st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance,
On public taste to foist thy stale romance,
Though Murray with his Miller may combine
To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line?
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No! when the sons of song descend to trade,
Their bays are sear, their former laurels fade.
Let such forego the poet’s sacred name,
Who rack their brains for lucre, not for fame:
Still for stern Mammon may they toil in vain!
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And sadly gaze on gold they cannot gain!
Such be their meed, such still the just reward
Of prostituted muse and hireling bard!
For this we spurn Apollo’s venal son,
And bid a long ‘good night to Marmion.’1
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These are the themes that claim our plaudits now;
These are the bards to whom the muse must bow;
While Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot,
Resign their hallow’d bays to Walter Scott.
The time has been, when yet the muse was young,
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When Homer swept the lyre, and Maro sung,
An epic scarce ten centuries could claim,
While awe-struck nations hail’d the magic name:
The work of each immortal bard appears
The single wonder of a thousand years.2
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Empires have moulder’d from the face of earth,
Tongues have expired with those who gave them birth,
Without the glory such a strain can give,
As even in ruin bids the language live.
Not so with us, though minor bards content,
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On one great work a life of labour spent:
With eagle pinion soaring to the skies,
Behold the ballad-monger Southey rise!
To him let Camoëns, Milton, Tasso yield,
Whose annual strains, like armies, take the field.
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First in the ranks see Joan of Arc advance,
The scourge of England and the boast of France!
Though burnt by wicked Bedford for a witch,
Behold her statue placed in glory’s niche;
Her fetters burst, and just released from prison,
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A virgin phœnix from her ashes risen.
Next see tremendous Thalaba come on,1
Arabia’s monstrous, wild, and wond’rous son;
Domdaniel’s dread destroyer, who o’erthrew
More mad magicians than the world e’er knew.
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Immortal hero! all thy foes o’ercome,
For ever reign – the rival of Tom Thumb!
Since startled metre fled before thy face,
Well wert thou doom’d the last of all thy race!
Well might triumphant genii bear thee hence,
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Illustrious conqueror of common sense!
Now, last and greatest, Madoc spreads his sails,
Cacique in Mexico, and prince in Wales;
Tells us strange tales, as other travellers do,
More old than Mandeville’s, and not so true.
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Oh, Southey! Southey!2 cease thy varied song!
A bard may chant too often and too long:
As thou art strong in verse, in mercy, spare!
A fourth, alas! were more than we could bear.
But if, in spite of all the world can say,
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Thou still wilt verseward plod thy weary way;
If still in Berkley ballads most uncivil,
Thou wilt devote old women to the devil,1
The babe unborn thy dread intent may rue:
‘God help thee,’ Southey, and thy readers too.2
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Next comes the dull disciple of thy school,
That mild apostate from poetic rule
The simple Wordsworth, framer of a lay
As soft as evening in his favourite May,3
Who warns his friend ‘to shake off toil and trouble,
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And quit his books, for fear of growing double;’4
Who, both by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose;
Convincing all, by demonstration plain,
Poetic souls delight in prose insane;
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And Christmas stories tortured into rhyme
Contain the essence of the true sublime.
Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy,
The idiot mother of ‘an idiot boy;’
A moon-struck, silly lad, who lost his way,
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And, like his bard, confounded night with day;1
So close on each pathetic part he dwells,
And each adventure so sublimely tells,
That all who view the ‘idiot in his glory‘
Conceive the bard the hero of the story.
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Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here,
To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?
Though themes of innocence amuse him best,
Yet still obscurity’s a welcome guest.
If Inspiration should her aid refuse
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To him who takes a pixy for a muse,2
Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass
The bard who soars to elegise an ass.
So well the subject suits his noble mind,
He brays, the laureat of the long-ear’d kind.
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Oh! wonder-working Lewis! monk, or bard,
Who fain wouldst make Parnassus a church-yard!
Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel bind thy brow
Thy muse a sprite, Apollo’s sexton thou!
Whether on ancient tombs thou takest thy stand,
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By gibb’ring spectres hail’d, thy kindred band;
To please the females of our modest age;
All hail, M.P.!3 from whose infernal brain
Thin sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train;
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At whose command ‘grim women’ throng in crowds,
And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds,
With ‘small gray men,’ ‘wild yagers,’ and what not,
To crown with honour thee and Walter Scott;
Again all hail! if tales like thine may please,
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St Luke alone can vanquish the disease;
Even Satan’s self with thee might dread to dwell,
And in thy skull discern a deeper hell.
Who in soft guise, surrounded by a choir
Of virgins melting, not to Vesta’s fire,
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With sparkling eyes, and cheek by passion flush’d,
Strikes his wild lyre, whilst listening dames are hush’d?
‘Tis Little! young Catullus of his day,
As sweet, but as immoral, in his lay!
Grieved to condemn, the muse must still be just,
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Nor spare melodious advocates of lust.
Pure is the flame which o’er her altar burns;
From grosser incense with disgust she turns:
Yet kind to youth, this expiation o’er,
She bids thee ‘mend thy line, and sin no more.’
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For thee, translator of the tinsel song,
To whom such glittering ornaments belong,
Hibernian Strangford! with thine eyes of blue,1
And boasted locks of red or auburn hue
Whose plaintive strain each love-sick miss admires,
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And o’er harmonious fustian half expires,
Learn, if thou canst, to yield thine author’s sense,
Nor vend thy sonnets on a false pretence.
Think’st thou to gain thy verse a higher place,
By dressing Camoëns2 in a suit of lace?
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Mend, Strangford! mend thy morals and thy taste;
Be warm, but pure; be amorous, but be chaste:
Cease to deceive; thy pilfer’d harp restore,
Nor teach the Lusian bard to copy Moore.
Behold! – ye tarts! one moment spare the text –
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Hayley’s last work, and worst – until his next;
Whether he spin poor couplets into plays,
Or damn the dead with purgatorial praise,
His style in youth or age is still the same,
For ever feeble and for ever tame.
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Triumphant first see ‘Temper’s Triumphs’ shine!
At least I’m sure they triumph’d over mine.
Of ‘Music’s Triumphs,’ all who read may swear
That luckless music never triumph’d there.1
Moravians, rise! bestow some meet reward
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On dull devotion – Lo! the Sabbath bard,
Sepulchral Grahame,2 pours his notes sublime
In mangled prose, nor e’en aspires to rhyme;
Breaks into blank the Gospel of St Luke,
And boldly pilfers from the Pentateuch;
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And, undisturb’d by conscientious qualms,
Perverts the Prophets, and purloins the Psalms.
Hail, Sympathy! thy soft idea brings
A thousand visions of a thousand things,
And shows, still whimpering through threescore of years,
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The maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers.
And art thou not their prince, harmonious Bowles!
Thou first, great oracle of tender souls?
Whether thou sing’st with equal ease, and grief,
The fall of empires, or a yellow leaf;
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Whether thy muse most lamentably tells
What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells,1
Or still in bells delighting, finds a friend
In every chime that jingled from Ostend;
Ah! how much juster were thy muse’s hap,
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If to thy bells thou wouldst but add a cap!
Delightful Bowles! still blessing and still blest,
All love thy strain, but children like it best.
‘Tis thine, with gentle Little’s moral song,
To soothe the mania of the amorous throng!
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With thee our nursery damsels shed their tears,
Ere miss as yet completes her infant years:
But in her teens thy whining powers are vain;
She quits poor Bowles for Little’s purer strain.
Now to soft themes thou scornest to confine
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The lofty numbers of a harp like thine;
‘Awake a louder and a loftier strain,’2
Such as none heard before, or will again!
Where all Discoveries jumbled from the flood,
Since first the leaky ark reposed in mud,
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By more or less, are sung in every book,
From Captain Noah down to Captain Cook.
Nor this alone; but, pausing on the road,
The bard sighs forth a gentle episode;1
And gravely tells – attend each beauteous miss! –
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When first Madeira trembled to a kiss.
Bowles! in thy memory let this precept dwell,
Stick to thy sonnets, man! – at least they sell.
But if some new-born whim, or larger bribe,
Prompt thy crude brain, and claim thee for a scribe;
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If chance some bard, though once by dunces fear’d,
Now, prone in dust, can only be revered;
If Pope, whose fame and genius, from the first,
Have foil’d the best of critics, needs the worst,
Do thou essa: each fault each failin scan
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The first of poets was, alas! but man.
Rake from each ancient dunghill ev’ry pearl,
Consult Lord Fanny, and confide in Curll;2
Let all the scandals of a former age
Perch on thy pen, and flutter o’er thy page;
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Affect a candour which thou canst not feel,
Clothe envy in the garb of honest zeal;
Write, as if St John’s soul could still inspire,
And do from hate what Mallet3 did for hire.
Oh! hadst thou lived in that congenial time,
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To rave with Dennis, and with Ralph to rhyme;4
Throng’d with the rest around his living head,
Not raised thy hoof against the lion dead;1
A meet reward had crown’d thy glorious gains,
And link’d thee to the Dunciad for thy pains.
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Another epic! Who inflicts again
More books of blank upon the sons of men?
Bœotian Cottle, rich Bristowa’s boast,
Imports old stories from the Cambrian coast,
And sends his goods to market – all alive!
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Lines forty thousand, cantos twenty-five!
Fresh fish from Helicon!2 who’ll buy? who’ll buy?
The precious bargain’s cheap – in faith, not I.
Your turtle-feeder’s verse must needs be flat,
Though Bristol bloat him with the verdant fat;
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If Commerce fills the purse, she clogs the brain,
And Amos Cottle strikes the lyre in vain.
In him an author’s luckless lot behold,
Condemn’d to make the books which once he sold.
Oh, Amos Cottle! – Phoebus! what a name
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To fill the speaking trump of future fame! –
Oh, Amos Cottle! for a
moment think
What meagre profits spring from pen and ink!
When thus devoted to poetic dreams,
Who will peruse thy prostituted reams?
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Oh pen perverted! paper misapplied!
Had Cottle3 still adorn’d the counter’s side,
Bent o’er the desk, or, born to useful toils,
Been taught to make the paper which he soils,
Plough’d, delved, or plied the oar with lusty limb,
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He had not sung of Wales, nor I of him.
As Sisyphus against the infernal steep
Rolls the huge rock whose motions ne’er may sleep,
So up thy hill, ambrosial Richmond, heaves
Dull Maurice1 all his granite weight of leaves:
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Smooth, solid monuments of mental pain!
The petrifactions of a plodding brain
That, ere they reach the top, fall lumbering back again.
With broken lyre, and cheek serenely pale,
Lo! sad Alcæus wanders down the vale;
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Though fair they rose, and might have bloom’d at last,
His hopes have perish’d by the northern blast:
Nipp’d in the bud by Caledonian gales,
His blossoms wither as the blast prevails!
O’er his lost works let classic Sheffield weep;
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May no rude hand disturb their early sleep!2
Yet say! why should the bard at once resign
His claim to favour from the sacred nine?
For ever startled by the mingled howl
Of northern wolves, that still in darkness prowl;
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A coward brood which mangle as they prey,
By hellish instinct, all that cross their way;
Aged or young, the living or the dead,
No mercy find – these harpies must be fed.
Why do the injured unresisting yield
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The calm possession of their native field?
Why tamel thus before their fangs retreat,
Nor hunt the bloodhounds back to Arthur’s Seat?3
Health to immortal Jeffrey! once, in name,
England could boast a judge almost the same;
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In soul so like, so merciful, yet just,
Some think that Satan has resin’d his trust,
And given the spirit to the world again,
To sentence letters, as he sentenced men.
With hand less mighty, but with heart as black,
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With voice as willing to decree the rack;
Bred in the courts betimes, though all that law
As yet hath taught him is to find a flaw;
Since well instructed in the patriot school
To rail at party, though a party tool,
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Who knows, if chance his patrons should restore
Back to the sway they forfeited before,
His scribbling toils some recompense may meet,
And raise this Daniel to the judgment-seat?1