being damn'd,—
'Damnation follows death in other men,
But your damn'd Poet lives and writes agen.'"
And so they do, even unto the present, otherwise blessed day. But, dear old friend, is not this sublime sneering? and is there not an honest ray or two of truth mingled here and there in the colder coruscations of this wit? Of the sincerity of this repudiation and renunciation so fashionable in the Pope circle I have nothing to say; but in certain moods of the mind it is vastly entertaining, and cures one's melancholy as cautery cures certain physical afflictions. It may be amusing for you also to notice that Don Quixote's niece and Pope were of the same mind. She called poetry "a catching and incurable disease," and Pope's unfortunate Poet "lives and writes agen."
And, after all, Bobus, why should we not be tender with all the gentlemen who crowd the catalogues and slumber upon the shelves? It may be all very well for you or me, whose legend should be
"Prandeo, poto, cano, ludo, lego, coeno, quiesco,"
to laugh at them; but who shall say that they did not do their best, and, if they were stupid, pavonian, arrogant, self-sufficient, and top-heavy, that they were not honestly so? I always liked that boast of Flaccus about his "monument harder than brass." It is a cheerful sight to see a poor devil of an author in his garret, snapping his fingers at the critics. "No beggar," wrote Pope, "is so poor but he can keep a cur, and no author so beggarly but he can keep a critic." And, after all, abuse is pleasanter than contemptuous and silent neglect. I do honestly believe, that, if it were not for a little too much false modesty, every author, and especially the poets, would boldly and publicly anticipate posthumous fame. Do you think that Sir Thomas Urquhart, when he wrote his "[Greek: EKSKUBALAURON], or, The Discovery of a most Precious Jewel," etc., fancied that the world would willingly let his reverberating words faint into whispers, and, at last, into utter silence?—his "metonymical, ironical, metaphorical, and synecdochal instruments of elocution, in all their several kinds, artificially affected, according to the nature of the subject, with emphatical expressions in things of great concernment, with catachrestical in matters of meaner moment; attended on each side respectively with an epiplectic and exegetic modification, with hyperbolical, either epitatically or hypocoristically, as the purpose required to be elated or extenuated, they qualifying metaphors, and accompanied with apostrophes; and, lastly, with allegories of all sorts, whether apologal, affabulatory, parabolary, aenigmatic, or paroemial"? Would you have thought that so much sesquipedality could die? Certainly the Knight of Cromartie did not, and fully believing Posterity would feel an interest in himself unaccorded to any one of his contemporaries, he kindly and prudently appended the pedigree of the family of Urquharts, preserving every step from Adam to himself. This may have been a vanity, but after all it was a good sturdy one, worthy of a gentleman who could not say "the sun was setting," but who could and did say "our occidental rays of Phoebus were upon their turning oriental to the other hemisphere of the terrestrial globe." Alas! poor Sir Thomas, who must needs babble the foolish hopes which wiser men reticently keep cloistered in their own bosoms! who confessed what every scribbler thinks, and so gets laughed at,—as wantons are carried to the round-house for airing their incontinent phraseology in the street, while Blowsalinda reads romances in her chamber without blushing. Modesty is very well; but, after all, do not the least self-sufficient of us hope for something more than the dirty dollars,—for kindness, affection, loving perusal, and fostering shelter, long after our brains have mouldered, and the light of our eyes has been quenched, and our deft fingers have lost their cunning, and the places that knew us have forgotten our mien and speech and port forever? Very, very few of us can join in Sir Boyle Roche's blundering sneer at posterity, and with the hope of immortality mingles a dread of utter oblivion here. Will it not be consoling, standing close by the graves which have been prepared for us, to leave the world some little legacy of wisdom sedulously gleaned from the fields of the fading past,—some intangible, but honest wealth, the not altogether worthless accumulation of an humble, but earnest life,—something which may lighten the load of a sad experience, illuminate the dark hours which as they have come to all must come to all through all the ages, or at least divert without debauching the mind of the idler, the trifler, and the macaroni? I believe this ingenuous feeling to be very far removed from the wheezy aspirations of windy ignorance, or the spasms for fame which afflict with colic the bowels, empty and flatulent, of sheer scribblers and dunces who take a mean advantage of the invention of printing. Let us be tender of the honest gentlemen who, to quote Cervantes, "aim at somewhat, but conclude nothing." I cannot smile at the hopes of the boy Burns,—
"That he, for poor auld Scotland's sake,
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make,
Or sing a sang at least."
And while I am in a humor for quotation, I must give you this muscular verse from Henry More's "Platonic Song of the Soul":—
"Their rotten relics lurk close under ground;
With living weight no sense or sympathy
They have at all; nor hollow thundering sound
Of roaring winds that cold mortality
Can wake, ywrapt in sad Fatality:
To horse's hoof that beats his grassie dore
He answers not: the moon in silency
Doth passe by night, and all bedew him o'er
With her cold, humid rayes; but he feels not Heaven's power."
How we shiver in the icy, midnight moonbeams of the recluse of Christ's College! How preciously golden seem the links of our universal brotherhood, when the Fates are waving their dark wings around us, and menace us with their sundering! I am not sure, my worthy Wagonero, that, rather than see my own little cord finally cut, I would not consent to be laughed at by a dozen generations, in the hope that it might happen to me that the thirteenth, out of sheer weariness at the prolonged lampooning, might grow pitiful at my purgatorial experiences, and so betake itself to nursing and fondling me into repute, furnishing me with half-a-dozen of those lynx-eyed commentators who would discern innumerable beauties and veracities through the calfskin walls of my beatified bantling. They might find, at last, that I had "the gold-strung harp of Apollo" and played a "most excellent diapason, celestial music of the spheres,"—hearing the harmony
"As plainly as ever Pythagoras did,"
when "Venus the treble ran sweet division upon Saturn the bass."
Write for posterity! Pray, whom should we write for, in this age which makes its own epic upon sounding anvils, and whose lyric is yelled from the locomotive running a muck through forest and field and beside the waters no longer still? Write poetry now, when noise has become normal, and we are like the Egyptians, who never heard the roaring of the fall of Nilus, because the racket was so familiar to them! The age "capers in its own fee simple" and cries with the Host in "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," "Away with punctilios and orthography!" Write poetry now! Thank you, my ancient friend! "My fiddlestick cannot play without rosin." To be sure, I am, like most minstrels, ready for an offer; and should any lover of melody propose
"Two hundred crowns, and twenty pounds a year
For three good lives,"
I should not be slow in responding, "Cargo! hai Trincalo!" and in presently getting into the best possible trim and tune. But the poet may say now, with the Butler in the old play, "Mine are precious cabinets, and must have precious jewels put into them; and I know you to be merchants of stock-fish, dry meat, and not men for my market; then vanish!"
Barrow said that "poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense"; and I think, that, deceived by the glut, the present time is very much of Barrow's mind. But, courage, my music-making masters! Your warbling, if it be of genuine quality, shall echo upon the other side of the hill which hides the unborn years. Only be sure, the song be pure; and you may "give the fico to your adversaries." You may live in the hearts and upon the lips of men and women
