“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. Shakspeare, of whom an amiable writer kindly said, in 1723,—­“There is certainly a great deal of entertainment in his comical Humors, and a pleasing and well-distinguished variety in those characters which he thought fit to meddle with.  His images are indeed everywhere so lively, that the thing he would represent stands full before you, and you possess every part of it.  His sentiments are great and natural, and his expression just, and raised in proportion to the subject and occasion.”  You may laugh at this as much as you please, Don Bob; but I think it quite as sensible as many of the criticisms of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,—­as that one of his, for instance, upon “Measure for Measure,” which I never read without a feeling of personal injury.  I should like to know if it is writing criticism to write,—­“Of this play, the light or comic part is very natural and pleasing; but the grave scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labor than elegance.”  Now, if old Boltcourt had written instead, as he might have done, if the fit