Of tuneless throats that made the attics ring With all the harshest notes that they could bring.

Zounds! how it made him chase,
Full of his new emancipating zeal,
To look around upon this brute-bastile,
And see the king of creatures in—a safe!
The desert's denizen, in one small den,
Swallowing slavery's most bitter pills;
A bear in bars unbearable; and then,
The fretful porcupine, with all its quills,
Imprison'd in a pen !

A tiger limited to four feet ten;
And, still worse lot,
A leopard to one spot!
An elephant enlarged,
But not discharg'd.

He went above-a solitary mounter
Up gloomy stairs-and saw a pensive group
Of hapless fowls-

Cranes vultures-owls

In fact it was a sort of poultry-compter,
Where feather'd prisoners were doom'd to droop :
Here sat an eagle, forced to make a stoop,
Not from the skies, but his impending roof;
And there aloof,

A pining ostrich, moping in a coop;
With other samples of the bird creation,
All caged against their powers and their wills;
And cramped in such a space the longest bills
Were plainly bills of least accommodation-
In truth, it was a very ugly scene

To fall to any liberator's share.

His temper little mended,

Pug from his bird-cage walk at last descended
Unto the lion and the elephant,

His bosom in a pant

To see all nature's free list thus suspended, And beasts deprived of what she had intended. They could not even prey

In their own way;

A hardship always reckon'd quite prodigious.

Thus he revolved

And soon resolved

To give them freedom, civil and religious.

That night there were no country cousins, raw
From Wales, to view the lion and his kin.
The keeper's eyes were fix'd upon a saw;
The saw was fix'd upon a bullock's shin;
Meanwhile, with stealthy paw,
Pug hasten'd to withdraw

The bolt that kept the king of brutes within-
Now, monarch of the forest! thou shalt win
Precious enfranchisement-thy bolts are undone―
Thou art no longer a degraded creature,
But loose to roam with liberty and nature,
And free of all the jungles about London.
Alas for freedom and for freedom's hero!
Alas for liberty of life and limb!
For pug had only half unbolted Nero,
When Nero bolted him!

SECTION LXXXII.

BEN JONSON-DRUMMOND.....lbid.

Jonson. MASTER DRUMMOND, will you do me one special favour ?

Drummond. Excellent sir, why do you ask? shall not I, and all my household, bend the knee to the laureate; the king of scholars and of bards? It is your part to command, and ours to obey.

Jons. Marry, sir, the favour I have to ask is but this: that you would order your serving men not to ring that great bell in the old tower at night; and secondly, that you would prevent your clock in the outer hall from striking any more. What have we to do with the vulgar admeasurement of time?

Drum. Your desire shall be implicitly fulfilled, and orders given forthwith. Formerly, indeed, I was an early riser, especially at this time, when the first of the spring season invites the birds to sing at break of day; and I was as regular in my habits as any pleader in the courts of the city. But those humours had their sway, and are now worn out. What I once was I never shall be again.

Jons. My friend, you have laboured in the school of Petrarch, till even your ordinary conversation resembles one of his doloroso sonnets. Will the study of green leaves and singing birds ever make one a poet?

Drum. With submission, sir, I still think that Petrarch is one of the noblest of these worthies with whom we are acquainted Misfortune, as you know, hath lately broken the dearest ties that bound me to mine own country. I intend, ere long, retracing your steps through France, and also going over into Italy. One of my chief objects there will be, to pay my devotions to his memory at Valclusa.

Jons. Petrarch, sir, as I have often told you, was fit only to be a mere monk or hermit of the desert, and was no poet. No man that ever had the genuine temperament of poetic fantasy, would voluntarily write sonnets, which are a species of crambo, suited only to the self-conceited melancholiac, and deserving the execration of every wise critic. I cry you mercy! That you are a sonnetteer, proceeds not from your natural bent, but from the force of bad example.

Drum. Master Jonson, may I beg to remind you, that this is a subject on which we are not like ever to agree? It had better therefore be dismissed.

Jons. Willingly, my worthy friend. Now, I'll tell you what I like among the pleasure of your country-house to hear the never-ceasing murmurs of the river, and the winds of night in blended music around us, (when we have leisure to listen to them,) only to make us enjoy a blazing fire and a can of sack with greater zest. I perceive clearly, that in your Italian humour you are most absolute. But it is only for your benefit that I have spoken. What! am I not your countryman? We have other bonds of sympathy besides those woven by the muses.

Drum. I am well advised, sir, of your preference for the real employments and humours of men in the busy world, as the fittest subjects for poetry, but――

Jons. Aye, marry, if I took to king Arthur's story (as it hath frequently been mine intention) where the ground work may be all a fiction, yet I would have my characters speak, and act, and think like to living men and women.

Drum. I doubt it not, sir; yet I continue, with submission, to indulge somewhat of a different opinion. I enjoy mirth and good cheer and the society of friends. But on returning to my books, I love, for variety's sake, to change to an ideal world, to speak an artificial language,

T

to move in the sphere of dreams and fantasy. In truth, what is there more shadowy, more subject to change, than that life which we term real? If we retire for a space to the quietness of fields and woods, and by reflection loosen the bonds of ordinary habit, how much then are we disposed to wonder at the dominion which this daily life has over us! We then become willing to enter on a new course of thought-to believe that we hear unearthly voices, and voluntarily to cherish a waking dream, of which the utterance differs wholly from the usual language of men! I love Shakspeare because he exemplified both styles of compo

sition.

Jons. I grant that he did so, and, between ourselves, he will be a long liver with posterity. But the prevailing defect of Shakspeare is his want of learning. It would almost make the great white owl in your old tower laugh to hear of his blunders.

Drum. In my judgment, sir, Shakspeare will be praised even for his sonnets alone, long after the most learned of our present writers are forgotten. I would say something in favour of Sir William Alexander; but I do not, because friendship would make me partial.

Jons. I say nothing of him, because he is your friend. And to your observation about Shakspeare, especially touching his sonnets, I have scarcely patience to answer. He! he be celebrated when men of learning are forgotten! But "De mortuis nil nisi bonum."

Drum. Cry you mercy, sir! You know that-you have yourself allowed

He

Jons. know very well all that you would say. wrote sonnets, and that is enough for you. But let me proceed. Can works that have no solid foundations to rest upon live longer than others-than mine own, for example, that are built on the rock of knowledge;-on a philosophy drawn from all the worthies of antiquity, with plots, and narratives, and characters which are purely original? Wait, I pray you, until I have returned to mine own study within the city walls. I have no greenfields, no singing birds, no purling streams there, Master Drummond! Yet shall I celebrate your Loch Lomond in such manner that my poem shall flourish as long as there is water in the lake, or a tree in the forest. Wait until you have seen my Chrologia-my worthies of England-the worthies of Scotland too!-I shall not forget your Wallace nor your Bruce-nor

yourself, Master Drummond. The impressions of your kindness, your friendship and your hospitality, will never from my heart!

* * *

SECTION LXXXIII.

EXTRACT FROM AN ARTICLE ON MILTON.....Edinburgh Review.

THE principles of the revolution have often been grossly misrepresented, and never more than in the course of the present year. There is a certain class of men, who, while they profess to hold in reverence the great names and great actions of former times, never look at them for any other purpose than in order to find in them some excuse for existing abuses. In every venerable precedent, they pass by what is essential, and take only what is accidental: they keep out of sight what is beneficial, and hold up to public imitation all that is defective. If, in any part of any great example, there be any thing unsound, these flesh-flies detect it with an unerring instinct, and dart upon it with a ravenous delight. They cannot always prevent the advocates of a good measure from compassing their end; but they feel, with their prototype, that

'Their labours must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil.'

To the blessings which England has derived from the revolution, these people are utterly insensible. The expulsion of a tyrant, the solemn recognition of popular rights, liberty, security, toleration, all go for nothing with them. One sect there was, which, from unfortunate temporary causes, it was thought necessary to keep under close restraint. One part of the empire there was, so unhappily circumstanced, that at that time its misery was necessary to our happiness, and its slavery to our freedom! These are the parts of the revolution which the politicians of whom we speak love to contemplate, and which seem to them, not indeed to vindicate, but in some degree to palliate the good which it has produced. Talk to them of Naples, of Spain, or of South America! they stand forth, zealots for the doctrine of divine right-which has now come back to us, like a thief from transportation, under the alias of le