'Tis said no one in hand" can hold a fire

By thought of frosty Caucasus;" (') but few, I really think; yet Juan's then ordeal

Was more triumphant, and not much less real.

XCVII.

Here I might enter on a chaste description,
Having withstood temptation in my youth, (2)
But hear that several people take exception

At the first two books having too much truth; Therefore I'll make Don Juan leave the ship soon. Because the publisher declares, in sooth, Through needles' eyes it easier for the camel is pass, than those two cantos into families.

Το

XCVIII.

'Tis all the same to me; I'm fond of yielding, And therefore leave them to the purer page Of Smollett, Prior, Ariosto, Fielding,

Who say strange things for so correct an age; I once had great alacrity in wielding

My pen, and liked poetic war to wage, And recollect the time when all this cant Would have provoked remarks which now it shan't. (3

(1) ["Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand,

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus ? "—

SHAKSPEARE'S Richard II.]

(2) [MS." Having had some experience in my youth."]

(3) [" Don Juan will be known, by and by, for what it is intended-a satire on abuses in the present states of society, and not an eulogy of vice. It may be now and then voluptuous: - I can't help that. Ariosto is

worse. Smollett (see Lord Strutwell in Roderick Random) ten times worse; and Fielding no better. No girl will ever be seduced by reading Don Juan:-No, no; she will go to Little's Poems, and Rousseau's Romans

Where are the epitaphs our fathers read?

Save a few glean'd from the sepulchral gloom Which once-named myriads nameless lie beneath, And lose their own in universal death.(1)

CIII.

I canter by the spot each afternoon

Where perish'd in his fame the hero-boy,
Who lived too long for men, but died too soon
For human vanity, the young De Foix !
A broken pillar, not uncouthly hewn,

But which neglect is hastening to destroy,
Records Ravenna's carnage on its face,

While weeds and ordure rankle round the base. (2)

subjects for the bard to describe, derived, in after-days, their name and designation from his description."-BISHOP HEBER.]

(1) ["Look back who list unto the former ages,

And call to count what is of them become,
Where be those learned wits and antique sages
Which of all wisdom knew the perfect sum?
Where those great warriors which did overcome
The world with conquest of their might and main,

And made one mear of the earth and of their reign."- SPENSER.] (2) The pillar which records the battle of Ravenna is about two miles from the city, on the opposite side of the river to the road towards Forli. Gaston de Foix, who gained the battle, was killed in it: there fell on both sides twenty thousand men. The present state of the pillar and its site is described in the text. - [De Foix was Duke of Nemours, and nephew to Louis XII., who gave him the government of Milan, and made him gene. ral of his army in Italy. The young hero signalised his valour and abilities in various actions, which terminated in the battle of Ravenna, fought on Easter-day, 1512. After he had obtained the victory, he could not be dissuaded from pursuing a body of Spanish infantry, which retreated in good order. Making a furious charge on this brave troop, he was thrown from his horse, and despatched by a thrust of a pike. He perished in his twenty-fourth year, and the king's affliction for his death embittered all the joy arising from his success. — MORERI.]

CIV.

I pass each day where Dante's bones are laid:
A little cupola, more neat than solemn,
Protects his dust, but reverence here is paid (1)

To the bard's tomb, (2) and not the warrior's
column:

The time must come, when both alike decay'd,

The chieftain's trophy, and the poet's volume, Will sink where lie the songs and wars of earth, Before Pelides' death, or Homer's birth.

CV.

With human blood that column was cemented,
With human filth that column is defiled,
As if the peasant's coarse contempt were vented
To show his loathing of the spot he soil'd: (3)
Thus is the trophy used, and thus lamented
Should ever be those blood-hounds, from whose wild
Instinct of gore and glory earth has known
Those sufferings Dante saw in hell alone. (4)

(1) [MS." Protects his tomb, but greater care is paid."]

(2) [Dante was buried (" in sacra minorum æde") at Ravenna, in a handsome tomb, which was erected by his protector, Guido da Polenta, restored by Bernardo Bembo in 1483, again restored by Cardinal Corsi, in 1692, and replaced by a more magnificent sepulchre in 1780, at the expense of the Cardinal Luigi Valent Gonzaga. The Florentines having in vain and frequently attempted to recover his body, crowned his image in a church, and his picture is still one of the idols of their cathedral. HOBHOUSE.]

(3) [MS.

"With human ordure is it now defiled, As if the peasant's scorn this mode invented To show his loathing of the thing he soil'd." (4) [MS." Those sufferings once reserved for Hell alone."

CVI.

Yet there will still be bards: though fame is smoke, Its fumes are frankincense to human thought; And the unquiet feelings, which first woke

Song in the world, will seek what then they sought;(1) As on the beach the waves at last are broke,

Thus to their extreme verge the passions brought Dash into poetry, (2) which is but passion, Or at least was so ere it grew a fashion.

CVII.

If in the course of such a life as was

At once adventurous and contemplative,
Men who partake all passions as they pass,
Acquire the deep and bitter power to give (3)
Their images again as in a glass,

And in such colours that they seem to live;
You may do right forbidding them to show 'em,
But spoil (I think) a very pretty poem.

CVIII.

Oh! ye, who make the fortunes of all books!
Benign Ceruleans of the second sex!
Who advertise new poems by your looks,
Your "imprimatur" will ye not annex?

(1) [MS.

"Its fumes are frankincense; and were there nought Even of this vapour, still the chilling yoke

Of silence would not long be borne by Thought."]

(2) ["The Bride of Abydos" was written in four nights, to distract my dreams from ... Were it not thus, it had never been composed; and had I not done something at that time, I must have gone mad, by eating my own heart-bitter diet!"-B. Diary, 1813.]

(3) [MS." I have drunk deep of passions as they pass,

And dearly bought the bitter power to give."]

What! must I go to the oblivious cooks? (1)

Those Cornish plunderers of Parnassian wrecks? Ah! must I then the only minstrel be,

Proscribed from tasting your Castalian tea! (2)

CIX.

What! can I 66 prove a lion" then no more? A ball-room bard, a foolscap, hot-press darling? To bear the compliments of many a bore,

And sigh," I can't get out," like Yorick's starling; Why then I'll swear, as poet Wordy swore, [ing) (3) (Because the world won't read him, always snarlThat taste is gone, that fame is but a lottery, Drawn by the blue-coat misses of a coterie. (4)

CX.

Oh! "darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,"

As some one somewhere sings about the sky, And I, learned ladies, say of you;

ye

[why, They say your stockings are so- (Heaven knows

GIFFORD.]

(1) ["To pastry-cooks and moths, and there an end.””.
(2) [MS.- -"What! must I go with Wordy to the cooks?
Read-were it but your Grandmother's to vex-

And let me not the only minstrel be

Cut off from tasting your Castalian tea."]

(3) [MS. —“ Why then I'll swear, as mother Wordsworth swore,

Because the world won't read her," &c.]

(4) [" Away, then, with the senseless iteration of the word popularity! In every thing which is to send the soul into herself, to be admonished of her weakness, or to be made conscious of her strength; wherever life and nature are described as operated upon by the creative or abstracting virtue of the imagination; wherever the instinctive wisdom of antiquity, and ber heroic passions, uniting, in the heart of the Poet, with the meditative wisdom of later ages, have produced that accord of sublimated humanity, which is at once a history of the remote past, and a prophetic announcement of the remotest future-there, the Poet must reconcile himself for a season to few and scattered hearers."- WORDSWORTH's Second Preface.]