And since not even our Rogers' praise To me, divine Apollo, grant-O! TO LORD THURLOW. "I lay my branch of laurel down: Then thus to form Apollo's crown, Let every other bring his own." Lord Thurlow's lines to Mr. Rogers. "I lay my branch of laurel down." Thou "lay thy branch of laurel down!" Why, what thou 'st stole is not enow; And, were it lawfully thine own, Does Rogers want it most, or thou? Keep to thyself thy wither'd bough, Or send it back to Doctor Donne:Were justice done to both, I trow, He'd have but little, and thou-none. "Then thus to form Apollo's crown." Inquire amongst your fellow-lodgers, "Let every other bring his own." When coals to Newscatle are carried, And owls sent to Athens, as wonders, From his spouse when the Regent's unmarried, Or Liverpool weeps o'er his blunders:1 When Tories and Whigs cease to quarrel, When Castlereagh's wife has an heir, Then Rogers shall ask us for laurel, And thou shalt have plenty to spare. And Lord Byron undertook to read it aloud; but he found it impossible to get beyond the first two words. Our laughter had now increased to such a pitch that nothing could restrain it. Two or three times he began, but, no sooner had the words 'When Rogers' passed his lips, than our fit burst forth afreshtill even Mr. Rogers himself, with all his feeling of our injustice, found it impossible not to join us; and had the author himself been of the party, I question much whether he could have resisted the infection."-Moore But now to my letter-to yours 't is an answer- And for Sotheby's Blues have deserted Sam Rogers; And you'll be Catullus, the Regent Mamurra.(1) IMPROMPTU, IN REPLY TO A FRIEND. And clouds the brow, or fills the eye; SONNET, TO GENEVRA. THINE eyes' blue tenderness, thy long fair hair, And the wan lustre of thy features-caught From contemplation-where serenely wrought, Seems Sorrow's softness charm'd from its despairHave thrown such speaking sadness in thine air, That-but I know thy blessed bosom fraught With mines of unalloy'd and stainless thoughtI should I ave deem'd thee doom'd to earthly care. (1). The reader who wishes to understand the full force of this scandalous insinuation, is referred to Muretus's notes on a celebrated poem of Catullus, entitled In Cæsarem; but consisting, in fact, of savagely scornful abuse of the favourite Mamurra: Quis hoc potest videre? quis potest pati, Habebat unctim, et ultima Britannia?" etc.-E. (2) "These verses are said to have dropped from the poet's pen, to excuse a transient expression of melancholy which overclouded the general gaiety". Walter Scott.-E. 916 SONNET, TO THE SAME. THY cheek is pale with thought, but not from woe, Gleams like a seraph from the sky descending, December 17, 1813. You call me still your life.-Oh! change the word— THE DEVIL'S DRIVE; AN UNFINISHED RHAPSODY. (2) THE devil return'd to hell by two, And he stay'd at home till five; And sausages made of a self-slain Jew- I should mount in a waggon of wounded men, "I have a state-coach at Carlton House, But they're lent to two friends, who make me And making a jump from Moscow to France, And rested his hoof on a turnpike road, But first as he flew, I forgot to say, To look upon Leipsic plain; And so sweet to his eye was its sulphury glare That he perch'd on a mountain of slain; For the field ran so red with the blood of the dead. But the softest note that soothed his ear Was the sound of a widow sighing; As round her fell her long fair hair; And she look'd to heaven with that frenzied air, Which seem'd to ask if a God were there! And, stretch'd by the wall of a ruin'd hut, When he dined on some homicides done in ragout, With its hollow cheek, and eyes half shut, And a rebel or so in an Irish stew, A child of famine dying: (2) I have lately written a wild, rambling, unfinished rhap sody, called The Devil's Drive,' the notion of which I took from Porson's Devil's Walk" B. Diary, 1815.-"This strange wild poem," says Moore," is, for the most part, rather clumsily executed, wanting the point and condensation of those clever And the carnage, begun when resistance is done, And the Devil was shock'd-and quoth he, "I But the Devil has reach'd our cliffs so white, If his eyes were good, he but saw by night But he made a tour, and kept a journal Of all the wondrous sights nocturnal, And he sold it in shares to the men of the Row, So instead of a pistol he cock'd his tail, And seized him by the throat: And bade him have no fear, But be true to his club, and stanch to his rein, Next to seeing a lord at the council-board, The devil gat next to Westminster, And he turn'd to "the room" of the Commons; And he thought, as a "quondam aristocrat," must go, For I find we have much better manners below; WINDSOR POETICS. (1) Lines composed on the occasion of His Royal Highness the Prince FAMED for contemptuous breach of sacred ties, ODE TO NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. (2) "Expende Annibalem:-quot libras in duce summo And he walk'd up the house so like one of our own, By this shameful abdication, he protracted his life a few years, He saw the Lord Liverpool seemingly wise, The Lord Westmoreland certainly silly, verses of Mr. Coleridge, which Lord Byron, adopting a notion (1) "I cannot conceive how the Vault has got about-but so (2) "To day I have boxed one hour-written an Ode to Na- "Produce the urn that Hannibal contains, And weigh the mighty dust which yet remains: till--" Gibbon's Decline and Fall, vol. vi. p. 220. (4) Is this the man of thousand thrones, do with great facility, as the inside of the coffin was smooth, (4 "I send you an additional molto from Gibbon, which you (5) "I don't know-but I think 1, even 1 (an insect compared Since he, miscall'd the Morning Star, Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far. Ill-minded man! why scourge thy kind Thou taught'st the rest to see. To those that worshipp'd thee: Thanks for that lesson-it will teach To after-warriors more That led them to adore The triumph, and the vanity, The rapture of the strife (1)— All quell'd!-Dark Spirit! what must be The desolator desolate! The victor overthrown! The arbiter of others' fate A suppliant for his own! Is it some yet imperial hope That with such change can calmly cope? To die a prince-or live a slave- rate it worth a ducat. Psha! 'something too much of this. But (2) "Out of town six days. On my return, find my poor little pagod, Napoleon, pushed off his pedestal It is his own fault. Like Milo, he would rend the oak; but it closed again, wedged his hands, and now the beasts-lion, bear, down to the dirtiest jackall-may all tear him. That Muscovite winter wedged his arms;-ever since, he has fought with his feet and teeth. The last may still leave their marks: and I guess now' (as the Yankees say), that he will yet play them a pass." B. Diary, April 8. (5) Sylla.-[We find the germ of this stanza in the diary of the evening before it was written :-"Methinks Sylla did better; for he revenged, and resigned in the height of his sway, red with the slaughter of his foes-the finest instance of glorious contempt of the rascals upon record. Dioclesian did well too Amurath not amiss, had he become aught except a dervise He who of old would rend the oak (2) And darker fate hast found: The Roman, (3) when his burning heart His only glory was that hour The Spaniard, when the lust of sway A strict accountant of his beads, A bigot's shrine nor despot's throne. (6) But thou-from thy reluctant hand The thunderbolt is wrung Too late thou leav'st the high command To which thy weakness clung; All evil spirit as thou art, It is enough to grieve the heart To see thine own unstrung; To think that God's fair world hath been Charles the Fifth but so so; but Napoleon worst of all." B Diary, April, 9]. (4) "Alter potent spell' to 'quickening spell:' the first (as Polonius says) is a vile phrase,' and means nothing, besides being common-place and Kosa-Matildaish. After the resolu tion of not publishing, though our Ode is a thing of little length and less consequence, it will be better altogether that it is anonymous." Lord B. to Mr. M. April 11.-E. (5) Charles the Fifth, Emperor of Germany, and king of Spain, resigned, in 1555, his imperial crown to his brother Ferdinand, and the kingdom of Spain to his son Philip, and retired to a monastery in Estremadura, where he conformed, in his manner of living, to all the rigour of monastic austerity. Not satisfied with this, he dressed himself in his shroud, was laid in his coffin with much solemnity, joined in the prayers which were offered up for the rest of his soul, and mingled his tears with those which his attendants shed, as if they had been celebrating a real funeral.-E. (6) "I looked," says Boswell, "into Lord Kaimes's Sketches of the History of Man, and mentioned to Dr. Johnson bis censure of Charles the Fifth, for celebrating his funeral obsequies And monarchs bow'd the trembling limb, Nor written thus in vain- Or deepen every stain: If thou hadst died as honour dies, But who would soar the solar height, Thy scales, Mortality! are just To all that pass away: But yet methought the living great To dazzle and dismay: Nor deem'd Contempt could thus make mirth And she, proud Austria's mournful flower, How bears her breast the torturing hour? Must she too bend, must she too share Thou throneless homicide? If still she loves thee, hoard that gem, in his life-time, which, I told him, I had been used to think a solemn and affecting act." JouNSON. "Why, sir, a man may dispose his mind to think so of that act of Charles; but it is so liable to ridicule, that if one man out of ten thousand laughs at it, he 'll make the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninetynine laugh too."-Croker's Boswell, vol. iv. p. 102.-E. (4) In the MS. But who would rise in brightest day To set without one parting ray?"-E. (2) Count Neipperg, a gentleman in the suite of the Emperor of Austria, who was first presented to Maria Louisa within a few days after Napoleon's abdication, became, in the sequel, her Chamberlain, and then her husband. He is said to have been a man of remarkably plain appearance. The Count died in 1831.-E. (3) Dionysius the Younger, esteemed a greater tyrant than his father, on being for the second time banished from Syracuse, retired to Corinth, where he was obliged to turn schoolmaster for a subsistence.-E. (4) The cage of Bajazet, by order of Tamerlane. In loitering mood upon the sand Thou, Timour! in his captive's cage (4) All sense is with thy sceptre gone, Life will not long confine That spirit, pour'd so widely forth- Or, like the thief of fire from heaven,(5) Foredoom'd by God-by man accurst,(6) There was a day-there was an hour, (8) Unsated to resign Had been an act of purer fame Through the long twilight of all time, But thou, forsooth! must be a king, To lip a wanton, and suppose her chaste."-Shakspeare. [We believe there is no doubt of the anecdote here alluded to -of Napoleon's having found leisure for an unworthy amour. the very evening of his arrival at Fontainebleau.-E.] (8) The three last stanzas, which Lord Byron had been solicited by Mr. Murray to write, to avoid the stamp duty then imposed upon publications not exceeding a sheet, were not published with the rest of the poem. "I don't like them at all," says Lord Byron, and they had better be left out. The fact is, 6. I can't do any thing I am asked to do, however gladly I would; and at the end of a week my interest in a composition goes off."-E. |