turned away from their brand-new Dorian hexameters to listen, delightedly, to that blind old fiddler from Chios, who sings about those effeminate Æolian princes and their trumpery Asiatic expedition.' Some one of them, perhaps, may have anticipated, more or less, the candour of Monsieur Falconet, who, after comparing the beauties of his own faultless model for Peter the Great's equestrian statue, with the countless defects of that inferior animal upon which Marcus Aurelius sits, an emperor for ever, above the steps of the Capitol at Rome, stopped, took a pinch of snuff, and ended his lecture thus: 'Et cependant, Messieurs, il faut avouier que cette vilaine bête est vivante, tandis que la mienne est morte.' In some such spirit, possibly, the laureate of Temenus, or the favourite rhapsode of Cresphontes, may have checked the sneers of those hangers-on and parasites by whom he was sure to be surrounded. He may have said to them,-'Nay, nay; you are too hard on the old man: there is often something fine in what he declaims; and could he correct himself of that horrible habit of dropping his h's, and of the other vulgar Ionisms which disfigure his style, I am certain that I could make something of him.' Oh, sacred but forgotten poet, I have no doubt that you could. He, however, has managed to do without you, and has made some thing of himself-so much, indeed, that we who are not provincial poets look upon him as the light of the past, the creator of Hellas, the bard of bards, the in exhaustible well-head A quo, seu fonte perenni Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis.' But were I Mr. Barnes, Mr. Waugh, or any member of their special literary guild, I should insist upon contemplating him from a different point of view-I should claim him as my particular ἄναξ ἀνδρῶνας the captain and patron-saint, if I may so speak, of my own poetical brotherhood; and, if ever a hostile. critic were ill-advised enough to decry my pretensions by saying, 'After all, you do not write English; you are only a provincial poet,' I should reply, without hesitation, 'True, so I am; so also in his day—was Homer.' |