no branch of literary reputation is so difficult to establish as that of first-rate poetic excellence. During the last fifty years, many meritorious competitors for bardic renown have successively aspired to public favour, and have each in their turns exhibited their fancy-woven bouquets, as containing a more beautiful assemblage of "flowers of all hue," as Milton divinely sings, than those which their equally emulative and praiseworthy compeers have, in their best attempts, laid out upon the parterre of the public. In the poetic foreground of the above period, are to be seen the names of Pye, Ogilvie, Whitehead, Tasker, Mason, Cowper, Merry, Jerningham, Woty, Hurdis, Pratt, Fitzgerald, &c. over whose metrical effusions, with the exception of the fifth and sixth, the clouds of obscurity have long since cast a darkening hue. Even the "Elegaic Sonnets" of Charlotte Smith, which first appeared in 1784, and formed a sort of poetical era in point of popularity, have long since "fallen into the sere and yellow leaf," as it was discriminately hinted by Burns would be the case with his soul-breathing Letters; the Sonnets by the Rev. W.L. Bowles, although emanating from a beautiful fountain-spring of thought and feeling, which should have screened their writer from the venomous shaft of Byron, have already sunk beneath the meridian of their popularity; and the loaded ornamental rhymes of Darwin; the prettily embroidered couplets of Miss Seward, together with the Della Cruscan Rhymes of Mary Robinson, Mrs. Cowley, &c. are left like daisies, plucked from the greensward, to perish beneath unfeeling neglect. Who now reads the verses of Ann Yearsley, the poetic milkwoman, who was so lauded beyond her deserts, by Mrs. H. More?—few or none. Why is this revolution in public taste? Because those master-spirits which guide the present age, have given birth to a species of poetry more legitimate and useful in its design, and more valuable in its tendencies and characteristics. Instead of the "namby pamby" verses of the period I have alluded to, and the coarse scurrility of style which runs with a discolouring vein through the satirical pages of Dr. Wolcot, we have now the heart-stirring metres of a Campbell, as in that beautiful rainbow of poetic loveliness and imagination, his "Pleasures of Hope." We have now a series of pictures bearing an impress as pleasant as the gleams of warm autumn in the "Pleasures of Memory," by Rogers; the wildness of Loutherbourgh, the grandeur of Salvator Rosa, the terror-striking forms of Fuseli, embodied with increased energy in the immortal Lays of Byron: the every-day incidents of life, copied with the graphic fidelity of a Sharp, and bearing the faithful stamp of cottage grouping, which distinguished the pencil of a Morland,—in the natural paintings of Crabbe. We have Catullus stealing from his couch, to breathe a new intonation into the harp of Moore; and last of all, we have the votaress of virtue and moral feeling, the Cambrian minstrel, Mrs. Hemans, making melancholy appear as delightful as love.
The Author of a Tradesman's Lays.
STANZAS FOR MUSIC
Though the waves of old Time are darkly advancing,
There still is one spot where the sunbeams are glancing,
There glow the gay visions of youth's sunny morn,
Safe from the ocean-wave, safe from the storm:
For Memory keeps the spot fresh and green ever,
The dark tides of Time, shall sweep over it never!
There Fancy, her mirror holds up to the eye,
And lovely the forms that come wandering by,
Like music come softly the sounds that have fled,
The voices of lov'd ones, the tones of the dead:
Oh Memory! keep that spot fresh and green ever,
And the dark tides of Time, sweep over it never.
For beautiful Hope, wanders oft to the Isle,
With her wreath of bright flowers, and radiant smile.
She stands with her finger upraised to the sky,
And she dries the sad tear-drop in Memory's eye:
An emerald green, be that Island for ever,
May the dark tides of Time, sweep over it never!
ANECDOTE GALLERY
CARDING A TITHE PROCTOR
In Ireland, carding the tithe proctors was occasionally resorted to by the White Boys, and was performed in the following manner:–
The tithe proctor was generally waked out of his first sleep by his door being smashed in; and the boys in white shirts desired him "never to fear," as they only intended to card him this bout for taking a quarter instead of a tenth from every poor man in the parish. They then turned him on his face upon the bed; and taking a lively ram cat out of a bag which they brought with them, they set the cat between the proctor's shoulders. The beast, being nearly as much terrified as the proctor, would endeavour to get off; but being held fast by the tail, he intrenched every claw deep in the proctor's back, in order to keep up a firm resistance to the White Boys. The more the tail was pulled back, the more the ram cat tried to go forward; at length, when he had, as he conceived, made his possession quite secure, main force convinced him to the contrary, and that if he kept his hold he must lose his tail. So, he was dragged backward to the proctor's loins, grappling at every pull, and bringing away here and there strips of the proctor's skin, to prove the pertinacity of his defence.
When the ram cat had got down to the loins he was once more placed at the shoulders, and again carded the proctor (toties quoties) according to his sentence.
WALKING GALLOWS
Among the extraordinary characters that turned up in the fatal "ninety-eight," there were few more extraordinary than Lieutenant H–, then denominated the "walking gallows;"—and such he certainly was, literally and practically.
Lieutenant H– was an officer of the line on half pay. His brother was one of the solicitors to the Crown—a quiet, tremulous, vino deditus sort of man, and a leading Orangeman;—his widow who afterwards married and survived a learned doctor, was a clever, positive, good-looking Englishwoman, and, I think, fixed the doctor's avowed creed: as to his genuine faith, that was of little consequence.
Lieutenant H– was about six feet two inches high;—strong, and broad in proportion. His strength was great, but of the dead kind unaccompanied by activity. He could lift a ton, but could not leap a rivulet; he looked mild, and his address was civil—neither assuming nor at all ferocious. I knew him well, and from his countenance should never have suspected him of cruelty; but so cold-blooded and so eccentric an executioner of the human race I believe never yet existed, save among the American Indians.6
His inducement to the strange barbarity he practised I can scarcely conceive; unless it proceeded from that natural taint of cruelty which so often distinguishes man above all other animals when his power becomes uncontrolled. The propensity was probably strengthened in him from the indemnities of martial law, and by those visions of promotion whereby violent partizans are perpetually urged, and so frequently disappointed.
At the period alluded to, law being suspended, and the courts of justice closed, the "question" by torture was revived and largely practised. The commercial exchange of Dublin formed a place of execution; even suspected rebels were every day immolated as if convicted on the clearest evidence; and Lieutenant H–'s pastime of hanging on his own back persons whose physiognomies he thought characteristic of rebellion was (I am ashamed to say) the subject of jocularity instead of punishment. What in other times he would himself have died for, as a murderer, was laughed at as the manifestation of loyalty: never yet was martial law so abused, or its enormities so hushed up as in Ireland. Being a military officer, the lieutenant conceived he had a right to do just what he thought proper, and to make the most of his time while martial law was flourishing.
Once,
His mode of execution being perfectly novel, and at the same time
