And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead.

I therefore purpose not, or dream,
Descanting on his fate,

To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date:

But misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.

No voice divine the storm allay'd,

No light propitious shone;

When, snatch'd from all effectual aid.
We perish'd, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.

March 20, 1799.

TO SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

DEAR President, whose art sublime
Gives perpetuity to time,

And bids transactions of a day,

That fleeting hours would waft away
To dark futurity, survive,

And in unfading beauty live,-
You cannot with a grace decline
A special mandate of the Nine-
Yourself, whatever task you choose,
So much indebted to the Muse.

Thus the sisterhood:- We comesay Fix well your pallet on your thumb,

Prepare the pencil and the tints-
We come to furnish you with hints.
French disappointment, British glory,
Must be the subject of the story.

First strike a curve, a graceful bow,
Then slope it to a point below;
Your outline easy, airy, light,
Fill'd up, becomes a paper kite.
Let independence, sanguine, horrid,
Blaze like a meteor in the forehead:
Beneath (but lay aside your graces)
Draw six-and-twenty rueful faces,
Each with a staring, stedfast eye,
Fix'd on his great and good ally.
France flies the kite-'tis on the wing-
Britannia's lightning cuts the string.
The wind that raised it, ere it ceases,
Just rends it into thirteen pieces,
Takes charge of every fluttering sheet,
And lays them all at George's feet.
Iberia, trembling from afar,
Renounces the confederate war.
Her efforts and her arts o'ercome,
France calls her shatter'd navies home
Repenting Holland learns to mourn
The sacred treaties she has torn;
Astonishment and awe profound
Are stamp'd upon the nations round:
Without one friend, above all foes,
Britannia gives the world repose.

ON THE AUTHOR OF LETTERS ON
LITERATURE.*

THE Genius of the Augustan age

His head among Rome's ruins rear'd,
And, bursting with heroic rage,
When literary Heron appear'd,

Thou hast, he cried, like him of old
Who set the Ephesian dome on fire,
By being scandalously bold,
Attain'd the mark of thy desire.

And for traducing Virgil's name
Shalt share his merited reward;
A perpetuity of fame,

That rots, and stinks, and is abhorr'd.

THE DISTRESSED TRAVELLERS;

OR, LABOUR IN VAIN.

A New Song, to a Tune never sung before.

I SING of a journey to Clifton,†

We would have performed, if we could;
Without cart or barrow, to lift on

Poor Mary and me through the mud.

Slee, sla, slud,

Stuck in the mud;

Oh it is pretty to wade through a flood!

Nominally by Robert Heron,

been written by John Pinkerton. + A village near Olney.

Esq., but supposed to have 8vo. 1785.

Mrs. Unwin.

So away he went, slipping and sliding;
Hop, hop, à la mode de deux frogs;
'Tis near as good walking as riding,
When ladies are dressed in their clogs.
Wheels, no doubt,

Go briskly about,

But they clatter, and rattle, and make such a rout.

DIALOGUE.

SHE.

"Well! now, I protest it is charming;
How finely the weather improves !
That cloud, though 'tis rather alarming,
How slowly and stately it moves."

HE.

"Pshaw! never mind,

'Tis not in the wind,

We are travelling south, and shall leave it behind."

SHE.

"I am glad we are come for an airing,
For folks may be pounded, and penn'd,

Until they grow rusty, not caring
To stir half a mile to an end."

HE.

"The longer we stay,

The longer we may;

It's a folly to think about weather or way."

SHE.

"But now I begin to be frighted,

If I fall, what a way I should roll!
I am glad that the bridge was indicted,
Stay! stop! I am sunk in a hole!"

You'll not be the last, that will set a foot there."

SHE.

"Let me breathe now a little, and ponder
On what it were better to do;

That terrible lane I see yonder,

I think we shall never get through.''

HE.

"So think I:

But, by the by,

We never shall know, if we never should try."

SHE.

"But should we get there, how shall we get home?
What a terrible deal of bad road we have past!
Slipping, and sliding, and if we should come
To a difficult stile, I am ruined at last!
Oh this lane!

Now it is plain

That struggling and striving is labour in vain."

HE.

"Stick fast there while I

go

SHE.

and look;

"Don't go away, for fear I should fall :"