ture the drunken. Nor did
his son, who succeeded him in taste and office. I know not how a former
poet-laureat, Mr. Pye, managed; another man of letters who was fain to
accept a situation of this kind. Having been a man of fortune and a
member of Parliament, and loving his Horace to boot, he could hardly
have done without his wine. I saw him once in a state of scornful
indignation at being interrupted in the perusal of a manuscript by the
monitions of his police-officers, who were obliged to remind him, over
and over again, that he was a magistrate, and that the criminal
multitude were in waiting. Every time the door opened, he threatened and
he implored
"Otium divos rogat in patenti
Prensus."
Had you quoted this to Mr. Kinnaird, his eyes would have sparkled with
good-fellowship: he would have finished the verse and the bottle with
you, and proceeded to as many more as your head could stand. Poor
fellow, the last time I saw him, he was an apparition formidably
substantial. The door of our host's dining-room opened without my
hearing it, and, happening to turn round, I saw a figure in a great coat
literally almost as broad as it was long, and scarcely able to
articulate. He was dying of a dropsy, and was obliged to revive himself,
before he was fit to converse, by the wine that was killing him. But he
had cares besides, and cares of no ordinary description; and, for my
part, I will not blame even his wine for killing him, unless his cares
could have done it more agreeably. After dinner that day, he was
comparatively himself again, quoted his Horace as usual, talked of lords
and courts with a relish, and begged that _God save the King_ might be
played to him on the piano-forte; to which he listened, as if his soul
had taken its hat off. I believe he would have liked to die to _God save
the King_, and to have "waked and found those visions true."
[From Colburn's New Monthly Magazine.]
ODE TO THE SUN.
BY LEIGH HUNT.
The main object of this poem is to impress the beautiful and animating
fact, that the greatest visible agent in our universe, the Sun, is also
one of the most beneficent; and thus to lead to the inference, that
spiritual greatness and goodness are in like proportion, and its Maker
beneficence itself, through whatever apparent inconsistencies he may
work. The Sun is at once the greatest Might and Right that we behold.
A secondary intention of the poem is to admonish the carelessnes
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