me flattery of
titles, and foolish adoration of painted shepherdesses: poor weak
hobbling lines, eked out by 'eds and expletives, often terminated by
false rhymes, and made lamer by triplets and dreary Alexandrines;
ill-selected subjects, laboured, indelicate, or impossible similes,
passions frigid as Diana, wit's weapons dull as lead. Yet these (many
exceptions doubtless there were, and many redeeming _morceaux_ even in
the worst, charitable reader, but as of the rule we speak not falsely),
these are the poets of England, the men our great grandfathers delighted
to honour, the feared, the praised, the pensioned, and those whom we
their children still denominate--the poets! Praise, praise your stars,
ye lucky imps of Fame! who could tolerate you now-a-days?--You lived in
golden times, when Dorset, Harley, Bolingbroke, Halifax, and Company,
gave away places of a thousand a-year, as but justly due to any man who
could pen a roaring song, fabricate a fulsome sonnet, or bewail in
meagre elegiacs the still-resisting virtue of some persecuted Stella!
Happy fellows, easy conquisitors of wealth and fame, autocrats of
coffee-houses, feted and favoured by town-bred dames! In those good old
times for the fashionable Nine, an epic was sure to lead to a
Ministry-of-State, and even an epigram produced its pension: to be a
poet, or reputed so, was to be--eligible for all things; and the
fortunate possessor of a rhyming dictionary might have governed Europe
with his metrical protocols. But these halcyon times are of the
past--and so, verily, are their heroes. Farewell, a long farewell,
children of oblivion! farewell, Spratt, Smith, Duke, Hughes, King,
Pomfret, Phillips, and Blackmore: ye who, in that day of very small
things, just rose, as your Leviathan biographer so often testifies, "to
a degree of merit above mediocrity:" ye who--but (Candor and good
Charity, I thank you for the hint,) limited indeed is my knowledge of
your writings, ye long-departed poets, whom I thus am base enough to
pilfer of your bays; and therefore, if any man among you penned aught of
equal praise with "_My Mind to me a Kingdom is_," or "_No Glory I covet,
no Riches I want_," humbly do I cry that good man's pardon. Believe that
I have only seen the chateau of your fame, but never the rock on which
it rested; and therefore candidly consider, if I might not with reason
have accounted it a castle in the air?

Now, after this wholesale species of poetical massacr