from his donkey-cart, who dispenses doggrel and
grimaces in all the glory of plush and printed calico?"

"That, my most noble cynic, is a prodigious personage. Shall birth-days
and coronations be recorded in immortal odes, and Montem not have its
minstrel 1 He, sir, is Herbertus Stockhore; who first called upon his
muse in the good old days of Paul Whitehead,--

2 See plate of the Montem, sketched on the spot.

3 See Knight's Quarterly Magazine, No. II.

~102~~ run a race with Pye through all the sublimities of lyres and
fires,--and is now hobbling to his grave, after having sung fourteen
Montems, the only existing example of a legitimate laureate.

"He ascended his heaven of invention, before the vulgar arts of reading
and writing, which are banishing all poetry from the world, could clip
his wings. He was an adventurous soldier in his boyhood; but, having
addicted himself to matrimony and the muses, settled as a bricklayer's
labourer at Windsor. His meditations on the house-tops soon grew into
form and substance; and, about the year 1780, he aspired, with all the
impudence of Shad well, and a little of the pride of Petrarch, to the
laurel-crown of Eton. From that day he has worn his honors on his
'Cibberian forehead' without a rival."

"And what is his style of composition?"

"Vastly naive and original;--though the character of the age is
sometimes impressed upon his productions. For the first three odes, ere
the school of Pope was extinct, he was a compiler of regular couplets
such as--

'Ye dames of honor and lords of high renown,
Who come to visit us at Eton town.'"

During the next nine years, when the remembrance of Collins and Gray was
working a glorious change in the popular mind, he ascended to Pindarics,
and closed his lyrics with some such pious invocation as this:--

'And now we'll sing
God save the king,

And send him long to reign,
That he may come
To have some fun
At Montem once again. '

During the first twelve years of the present century, the influence of
the Lake school was visible in his ~103~~ productions. In my great
work I shall give an elaborate dissertation on his imitations of the
high-priests of that worship; but I must now content myself with a single
illustration:--

'There's ensign Ronnell, tall and proud,
Doth stand upon the hill,
And waves the flag to