Write for posterity!  Pray, whom should we write for, in this age which makes its own epic upon sounding anvils, and whose lyric is yelled from the locomotive running a muck through forest and field and beside the waters no longer still?  Write poetry now, when noise has become normal, and we are like the Egyptians, who never heard the roaring of the fall of Nilus, because the racket was so familiar to them!  The age “capers in its own fee simple” and cries with the Host in “The Merry Devil of Edmonton,” “Away with punctilios and orthography!” Write poetry now!  Thank you, my ancient friend!  “My fiddlestick cannot play without rosin.”  To be sure, I am, like most minstrels, ready for an offer; and should any lover of melody propose

  “Two hundred crowns, and twenty pounds a year
  For three good lives,”

I should not be slow in responding, “Cargo! hai Trincalo!” and in presently getting into the best possible trim and tune.  But the poet may say now, with the Butler in the old play, “Mine are precious cabinets, and must have precious jewels put into them; and I know you to be merchants of stock-fish, dry meat, and not men for my market; then vanish!”

Barrow said that “poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense”; and I think, that, deceived by the glut, the present time is very much of Barrow’s mind.  But, courage, my music-making masters!  Your warbling, if it be of genuine quality, shall echo upon the other side of the hill which hides the unborn years.  Only be sure, the song be pure; and you may “give the fico to your adversaries.”  You may live in the hearts and upon the lips of men and women yet unborn; and should the worst come, you may figure in “The Bibliographer’s Manual,” with a star of honor against your name, to indicate that you are exceedingly scarce and proportionally valuable; rival collectors, with fury in their faces, will run you up to a fabulous price at the auction, and you will at last be put into free quarters for life in some shady alcove upon some lofty shelf, with unlimited rations of dust, as you glide into a vermiculate dotage.  Why should you be faint-hearted, when the men of the stalls ask such a breath-stretching price for the productions of William Whitehead, Esq., who used to celebrate the birthdays of old George the Third after this fashion:—­

  “And shall the British lyre be mute,
  Nor thrill through all its trembling strings,
  With oaten reed and pastoral flute
  While every vale responsive rings?”

Ben Jonson called Inigo Jones Sir Lanthorn Leatherhead, but St. Paul’s still stands; and how many flies are there in the sparkling amber of “The Dunciad”!  Have the critics, poor birdling, torn your wings, and mocked at your recording?  I know, as Howell wrote to “Father Ben,” that “the fangs of a bear and the tusks of a wild-boar don’t bite worse and make deeper gashes than a goose-quill sometimes; no, not the badger himself, who is said