Thus hail'd your rulers their patrician clod, As Egypt chose an onion for a god. "Now fare ye well! enjoy your little hour; Go, grasp the shadow of your vanish'd power; Gloss o'er the failure of each fondest scheme; And pirates barter all that's left behind. (1) Show me the man whose counsels may have weight. mand; E'en factions cease to charm a factious land: Yet jarring sects convulse a sister isle, And light with maddening hands the mutual pile. “'Tis done, 'tis past, since Pallas warns in vain; The Furies seize her abdicated reign: Wide o'er the realm they wave their kindling brands (1) The Deal and Dover traffickers in specie. The banner'd pomp of war, the glittering files, But when the field is fought, the battle won, (1) ["The beautiful but barren Hymettus, the whole coast of Attica, her hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, &c. &c. are in themselves poetical; and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athen. ians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth. But, am I to be told that the "nature" of Attica would be more poetical without the "art" of the Acropolis? of the Temple of Theseus ? and of the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial genius? Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The COLUMNS of Cape Colonna, or the Cape itself? The rocks at the foot of it, or the recollection that Falconer's ship was bulged upon them? There are a thousand rocks and capes far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves. But it is the "art," the columns, the temples, the wrecked vessel, which give them their antique and their modern poetry, and not the spots themselves. I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; but why did I do so? The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them. Such is the poetry of art." -- B Letters, 1821.-E.] THE WALTZ AN APOSTROPHIC HYMN. (1) "Qualis in Eurotæ ripis, aut per juga Cynthi, VIRGIL. "Such on Eurota's banks, or Cynthia's height, DRYDEN'S VIRGIL (1) [This trifle was written at Cheltenham in the autumn of 1812, and published anonymously in the spring of the following year. It was not very well received at the time by the public; and the author was by no means anxious that it should be considered as his handiwork. "I hear," he says, in a letter to a friend, "that a certain malicious publication on waltzing is attributed to me. This report, I suppose, you will take care to contradict; as the author, I am sure, will not like that I should wear his cap and bells."— E.] |