enna"--Wits.

Wolcott, a native of Devonshire, was educated at Kingsbridge, and
apprenticed to an apothecary. He soon discovered a genius for painting
and poetry, and commenced to write about the middle of the last century
as Peter Pindar. He composed many odes on a variety of humorous
subjects, such as "The Lousiad," "Ode to Ugliness," "The Young Fly and
the Old Spider," "Ode to a Handsome Widow," whom he apostrophises as
"Daughter of Grief," "Solomon and the Mouse-trap," "Sir Joseph Banks and
the Boiled Fleas," "Ode to my Ass," "To my Candle," "An Ode to Eight
Cats kept by a Jew," whom he styles, "Singers of Israel." Lord Nelson's
night-cap took fire as the poet was wearing it reading in bed, and he
returned it to him with the words,

"Take your night-cap again, my good lord, I desire,
For I wish not to keep it a minute,
What belongs to a Nelson, where'er there's a fire,
Is sure to be instantly in it."

In "Bozzi and Piozzi" the former says:--

"Did any one, that he was happy cry,
Johnson would tell him plumply 'twas a lie;
A lady told him she was really so,
On which he sternly answered, 'Madam, no!
Sickly you are, and ugly, foolish, poor,
And therefore can't be happy, I am sure.'"

UPON POPE.

"'Grant me an honest fame, or grant me none,'
Says Pope, (I don't know where,) a little liar,
Who, if he praised a man, 'twas in a tone
That made his praise like bunches of sweet-briar,
Which, while a pleasing fragrance it bestows,
Pops out a pretty prickle on your nose."

He seems to have gained little by his early poems, many of which were
directed against the Royal Academicians. One commences:--

"Sons of the brush, I'm here again!
At times a Pindar and Fontaine,
Casting poetic pearl (I fear) to swine!
For, hang me, if my last years odes
Paid rent for lodgings near the gods,
Or put one sprat into this mouth divine."

Sometimes he calls the Academicians, "Sons of Canvas;" sometimes
"Tagrags and bobtails of the sacred brush." He afterwards wrote a
doleful elergy, "The Sorrows of Peter," and seems not to have thought
himself sufficiently patronized, alluding to which he says--

"Much did King Charles our Butler's works admire,
Read them and quoted them from morn to night,
Yet saw the bard in penury expire,
Whose wit had yielded him so much delight."

Wolcott was a little restricted by a due regard for religion or social
decorum. He reminds us of Sterne