ye wise, the lyre's precarious chords
To muse-mad baronets or madder lords,
Or country Crispins, now grown somewhat stale,
Twin Doric minstrels, drunk with Doric ale!
Hark to those notes, narcotically soft,
The cobbler-laureates sing to Capel Lofft!"[12]

From these select specimens, which comprise, altogether, little more
than an eighth of the whole poem, the reader may be enabled to form some
notion of the remainder, which is, for the most part, of a very inferior
quality, and, in some parts, descending to the depths of doggerel. Who,
for instance, could trace the hand of Byron in such "prose, fringed with
rhyme," as the following?--

"Peace to Swift's faults! his wit hath made them pass
Unmatch'd by all, save matchless Hudibras,
Whose author is perhaps the first we meet
Who from our couplet lopp'd two final feet;
Nor less in merit than the longer line
This measure moves, a favourite of the Nine.

"Though at first view, eight feet may seem in vain
Form'd, save in odes, to bear a serious strain,
Yet Scott has shown our wondering isle of late
This measure shrinks not from a theme of weight,
And, varied skilfully, surpasses far
Heroic rhyme, but most in love or war,
Whose fluctuations, tender or sublime,
Are curb'd too much by long recurring rhyme.

"In sooth, I do not know, or greatly care
To learn who our first English strollers were,
Or if--till roofs received the vagrant art--
Our Muse--like that of Thespis--kept a cart.
But this is certain, since our Shakspeare's days,
There's pomp enough, if little else, in plays;
Nor will Melpomene ascend her throne
Without high heels, white plume, and Bristol stone.

"Where is that living language which could claim
Poetic more, as philosophic fame,
If all our bards, more patient of delay,
Would stop like Pope to polish by the way?"

In tracing the fortunes of men, it is not a little curious to observe,
how often the course of a whole life has depended on one single step.
Had Lord Byron now persisted in his original purpose of giving this poem
to the press, instead of Childe Harold, it is more than probable that he
would have been lost, as a great poet, to the world.[13] Inferior as the
Paraphrase is, in every respect, to his former Satire, and, in some
places, even descending below the level of under-graduate versifiers,
its failure, there can