But of all Mohawks, Time is the fiercest.  If I were upon the high road to fame, if I had honestly determined to win immortality or perish in the attempt, I should look upon the gentleman with no clothing except a scanty forelock, and with no personal property save his scythe and hour-glass, as my greatest enemy,—­and I should behold the perpetual efforts made to kill him with perfect complacency.  This, I know, is not regarded as a strictly moral act; for this murderer of murderers is very much caressed by those who, in the name of Moses, would send a poor devil to his hempen destiny for striking an unlucky blow.  How continually is it beaten upon the juvenile tympanum,—­“Be careful of Time,”—­“Time is money,”—­“Make much of Time”!  Certainly, I do not know what he has done to merit consideration so tender.  The best that can be said of old Edax Rerum is that he has an unfailing appetite, and is not very fastidious about his provender,—­and that, if he does take heavy toll of the wheat, he also rids the world of no small amount of chaff.  But ’tis such a prodigious maw!

You think, Don Bob, that you know the name of every man who has distinguished himself since the days of Deucalion and Pyrrha.  Let us see how much you know.  I believe that in your day you had something to do with the new edition of the Aldine Poets.  I therefore ask you, in the name of an outraged gentleman, who is too dead to say much for himself, why you left out of the series my friend Mr. Robert Baston.  You have used Baston very ill.  Baston was an English poet.  Baston lived in the fourteenth century, and wove verses in Nottingham.  When proud Edward went to Scotland, he took Baston along with him to sing his victories.  Unhappily, Bruce caged the bird, and compelled him to amend his finest poems by striking out “Edward,” wherever the name of that revered monarch occurred, and inserting “Robert,” which, as I have said, he was obliged to do,—­and a very ridiculous mess the process must have made of Mr. Baston’s productions.  This is all I know of Baston; but is not this enough to melt the toughest heart?  No wonder he prologued his piping after the following dismal fashion:—­

  “In dreary verse my rhymes I make,
  Bewailing whilst such theme I take.”

However, Baston was a monk of the Carmelite species, and I hope he bore his agonies with religious bravery.

And now let us make a skip down to Charles Aleyn, temp. Charles I. “of blessed memory.”  A Sidney collegian of Cambridge, he began life as an usher in the 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:—­