n written
before me.
Other poets--I blush for them, Bill--may adore and repudiate in turn a
Libitina, perhaps, or Pandemos; my Venus, you know, is Laverna.
Nay, that epic of mine which begins from foundations the Bible is
built on--
"Of man's _first_ disobedience"--I've heard it attributed, dammy, to
Milton.
Well, it's lucky for them that it's not worth my while, as I may say,
to break spears
With the hirelings, forsooth, of the press who assert that Othello was
Shakespeare's.
When he that can run, sir, may read--if he borrows the book, or goes
on tick--
In my poems the bit that describes how the Hellespont joins the Propontic.
There are men, I believe, who will tell you that Gray wrote the whole
of The Bard--
Or that I didn't write half the Elegy, Bill, in a Country Churchyard.
When you know that my poem, The Poet, begins--"Ruin seize thee!" and ends
With recapitulations of horrors the poet invokes on his friends.
And I'll swear, if you look at the dirge on my relatives under the turf,
you
Will perceive it winds up with some lines on myself--and begins with
the curfew.
Now you'll grant it's more probable, Bill--as a man of the world, if
you please--
That all these should have prigged from myself than that I should have
prigged from all these.
I could cry when I think of it, friend, if such tears would comport
with my dignity,
That the author of Christabel ever should smart from such vulgar malignity.
(You remember perhaps that was one of the first little things that I
carolled
After finishing Marmion, the Princess, the Song of the Shirt, and
Childe Harold.)
Oh, doubtless it always has been so--Ah, doubtless it always will be--
There are men who would say that myself is a different person from me.
Better the porridge of patience a poor man snuffs in his plate
Than the water of poisonous laurels distilled by the fingers of hate.

'Tis a dark-purple sort of a moonlighted kind of a midnight, I know;
You remember those verses I wrote on Irene, from Edgar A. Poe?
It was Lady Aholibah Levison, daughter of old Lord St. Giles,
Who inspired those delectable strains, and rewarded her bard with her
smiles.
There are tasters who've sipped of Castalia, who don't look on _my_
brew as _the_ brew:
There are fools who can't think why the names of my heroines of title
should always be Hebrew.
'Twas my comrade, Sir Alister Knox, said, "Noo, dinna ye fash wi'