Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Lord Byron (1788–1824). Poetry of Byron. 1881.

IV. Satiric

Great Names

AND glory long has made the sages smile;

’Tis something, nothing, words, illusion, wind—

Depending more upon the historian’s style

Than on the name a person leaves behind:

Troy owes to Homer what whist owes to Hoyle:

The present century was growing blind

To the great Marlborough’s skill in giving knocks,

Until his late Life by Archdeacon Coxe.

Milton’s the prince of poets—so we say;

A little heavy, but no less divine:

An independent being in his day—

Learn’d, pious, temperate in love and wine;

But his life falling into Johnson’s way,

We’re told this great high priest of all the Nine

Was whipt at college—a harsh sire—odd spouse,

For the first Mrs. Milton left his house.

All these are, certes, entertaining facts,

Like Shakspeare’s stealing deer, Lord Bacon’s bribes;

Like Titus’ youth, and Cæsar’s earliest acts;

Like Burns (whom Doctor Currie well describes);

Like Cromwell’s pranks;—but although truth exacts

These amiable descriptions from the scribes,

As most essential to their hero’s story,

They do not much contribute to his glory.

All are not moralists, like Southey, when

He prated to the world of “Pantisocrasy;”

Or Wordsworth unexcised, unhired, who then

Season’d his pedlar poems with democracy;

Or Coleridge, long before his flighty pen

Let to the Morning Post its aristocracy;

When he and Southey, following the same path,

Espoused two partners (milliners of Bath).

Such names at present cut a convict figure,

The very Botany Bay in moral geography;

Their loyal treason, renegado rigour,

Are good manure for their more bare biography.

Wordsworth’s last quarto, by the way, is bigger

Than any since the birthday of typography;

A drowsy frowsy poem, call’d the “Excursion,”

Writ in a manner which is my aversion.

He there builds up a formidable dyke

Between his own and others’ intellect;

But Wordsworth’s poem, and his followers, like

Joanna Southcote’s Shiloh, and her sect,

Are things which in this century don’t strike

The public mind—so few are the elect;

And the new births of both their stale virginities

Have proved but dropsies, taken for divinities.

We learn from Horace, “Homer sometimes sleeps;”

We feel without him, Wordsworth sometimes wakes,—

To show with what complacency he creeps,

With his dear “Waggoners,” around his lakes.

He wishes for “a boat” to sail the deeps—

Of ocean?—No, of air; and then he makes

Another outcry for “a little boat,”

And drivels seas to set it well afloat.

If he must fain sweep o’er the etherial plain,

And Pegasus runs restive in his “Waggon,”

Could he not beg the loan of Charles’s Wain?

Or pray Medea for a single dragon?

Or if too classic for his vulgar brain,

He fear’d his neck to venture such a nag on,

And he must needs mount nearer to the moon,

Could not the blockhead ask for a balloon?

“Pedlars, and “Boats,” and “Waggons!” Oh! ye shades

Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?

That trash of such sort not alone evades

Contempt, but from the bathos’ vast abyss

Floats scumlike uppermost, and these Jack Cades

Of sense and song above your graves may hiss!—

The “little boatman,” and his “Peter Bell,”

Can sneer at him who drew “Achitophel!”