he celebrated school of Thomas Farnably,--another great
man of whom you never heard, O Don!--a famous school, in Goldsmith's
Rents, near Red-Cross Street, in the Parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate.
Those were stirring times; but Aleyn managed to write, before he died,
in 1640, a rousing great poem, intituled, "The Battailes of Crescey and
Poictiers, under the Fortunes and Valour of King Edward the Third of
that Name, and his Sonne, Edward, Prince of Wales, surnamed The Black."
8vo. 1633. Let me give you a taste of his quality, in the following
elaborate catalogue of the curiosities of a battle-field:--

"Here a hand severed, there an ear was cropped;
Here a chap fallen, and there an eye put out;
Here was an arm lopped off, there a nose dropped;
Here half a man, and there a less piece fought;
Like to dismembered statues they did stand,
Which had been mangled by Time's iron hand."

This is prosaic enough, and might have been written by a surgical
student; but this is better:--

"The artificial wood of spears was wet
With yet warm blood; and trembling in the wind,
Did rattle like the thorns which Nature set
On the rough hide of an armed porcupine;
Or looked like the trees which dropped gore,
Plucked from the tomb of slaughtered Polydore."

So much for Mr. Charles Aleyn.

But it is at the theatre, as you may well believe, that poets live and
die most like the blithesome grasshoppers. The poor players, marvellous
compounds of tin, feathers, and tiffany, fret but a brief hour; but the
playwright, less considered alive, is sooner defunct. I have not
Dodsley's Plays by me, but, if my memory does not deceive me, not one
of them keeps the stage; nor did dear Charles Lamb make many in love
with that huge heap in the British Museum. Alas! all these good people,
now grown so rusty, fusty, and forgotten, might have rolled under their
tongues, as a sweet morsel, those lines which civil Abraham Cowley sent
to Leviathan Hobbes:--

"To things immortal Time can do no wrong;
And that which never is to die forever must be young."

Alas! they had great first nights and glorious third nights,--lords and
ladies smiled and the groundlings were affable,--they lived in a
paradise of compliment and cash,--and then were no better off than the
garreteer who took his damnation comfortably early upon the first
night, and ran back to his den to whimper with mortification and to
tremble with cold. There is worthy Mr.