English bards and Scoth [sic] reviewers; a satire

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Page 15 - 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? 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!
Page 20 - Conceive the bard the hero of the story. 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 To him who takes a pixy for a muse, Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass The bard who soars to elegise an ass.
Page 8 - A mind well skill'd to find or forge a fault ; A turn for punning, call it Attic salt ; To Jeffrey go, be silent and discreet, His pay is just ten sterling pounds per sheet...
Page 54 - Unhappy White ! while life was in its spring,* And thy young muse just waved her joyous wing, The spoiler came ; and all thy promise fair Has sought the grave, to sleep for ever there. Oh ! what a noble heart was here undone, When Science...
Page 19 - 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; 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...
Page 19 - 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, Who warns his friend 'to shake off toil and trouble, And quit his books, for fear of growing double...
Page 54 - WHITE <lied at Cambridge in October 1806, in consequence of too much exertion in the pursuit of studies that would have matured a mind which disease and poverty could not impair, and which Death itself destroyed rather than subdued. His poems abound in such beauties as must impress the reader with the liveliest regret that so short a period was allotted to talents, which would have dignified eveu the sacred functions he was destined to assume.
Page 82 - Ooze to her skin, and stagnate there to mud, Cased like the centipede in saffron mail, Or darker greenness of the scorpion's scale — ( For drawn from reptiles only may we trace...
Page 9 - twill pass for wit; Care not for feeling — pass your proper jest, And stand a critic, hated yet caressed. And shall we own such judgment? no — as soon Seek roses in December — ice in June; Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff; Believe a woman or an epitaph, Or any other thing that's false, before You trust in critics, who themselves are sore; Or yield one single thought to be misled By Jeffrey's heart, or Lambe's Boeotian head.

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