bt resistless day;
Should no false kindness lure to loose delight,
Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright;
Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain,
And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain;
Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart,
Nor claim the triumph of a lettered heart;
Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade;
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee.
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause a while from letters to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron and the gaol.
See nations, slowly wise and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust.
If dreams yet flatter, once again attend,
Hear Lydiat's life, and Galileo's end.'

If this be not poetry, may the name perish!

In another style, the stanzas on the young heir's majority have such
great merit as to tempt one to say that the author of _The Jolly
Beggars_, Robert Burns himself, might have written them. Here are four
of them:

'Loosen'd from the minor's tether,
Free to mortgage or to sell;
Wild as wind and light as feather,
Bid the sons of thrift farewell.

'Call the Betseys, Kates, and Jennies,
All the names that banish care,
Lavish of your grandsire's guineas,
Show the spirit of an heir.

'Wealth, my lad, was made to wander,
Let it wander as it will;
Call the jockey, call the pander,
Bid them come and take their fill.

'When the bonny blade carouses,
Pockets full and spirits high--
What are acres? what are houses?
Only dirt--or wet or dry.'

Johnson's prologues, and his lines on the death of Robert Levet, are well
known. Indeed, it is only fair to say that our respected friend, the
General Public, frequently has Johnsonian tags on its tongue:

'Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.'

'The unconquered lord of pleasure and of pain.'

'He left the name at which the world grew pale
To point a moral or adorn a tale.'

'Death, kind nature's signal of retreat.'

'Panting Time toiled after him in vain.'

All these are Johnson's, who, though he is not, like Gray, whom he hated
so, all quotations, is yet oftener in men's mouths than they perhaps wot
of.

Johnson's tragedy, _Irene_, need not detain us. It is unreadable, and to
quote his