attempt to tune the stubborn lyre to music of the birthday of the world, to battles of the ichthyosaurus and the plesiosaurus, to loves of the mammoth and the mastodon.  But the public would have none of it, though ensphered in faultless verso, and the poets fled back to their flames and darts, and to the primrose at the river’s brim.  There is, however, something pathetic, and something that pleasantly reminds us of the elasticity of the human intellect in these failures; and the book before us is an amusing example of such eccentric efforts to enlarge the sphere of the poetic activity.

This little volume is called The Fancy, and it does not appear to me certain that the virtuous American conscience know what that means.  If the young ladies from Wells or Wellesley inquire ingenuously, “Tell us where is Fancy bred?” we should have to reply, with a jingle, In the fists, not in the head.  The poet himself, in a fit of unusual candour, says: 

  Fancy’s a term for every blackguardism,

though this is much too severe.  But rats, and they who catch them, badgers, and they who bait them, cocks, and they who fight them, and, above all, men with fists, who professionally box with them, come under the category of the Fancy.  This, then, is the theme which the poet before us, living under the genial sway of the First Gentleman of Europe, undertook to place beneath the special patronage of Apollo.  The attractions, however, of The Learned Ring, set all other pleasures in the shade, and the name, Peter Corcoran, which is a pseudonym, is, I suppose, chosen merely because the initials are those of the then famous Pugilistic Club.  The poet is, in short, the laureate of the P.C., and his book stands in the same relation to Boxiana that Campbell’s lyrics do to Nelson’s despatches.  To understand the poet’s position, we ought to be dressed as he was; we ought

        to wear a tough drab coat
  With large pearl buttons all afloat
  Upon the waves of plush; to tie
  A kerchief of the king-cup die
  (White-spotted with a small bird’s eye)
  Around the neck,—­and from the nape
  Let fall an easy> fan-like cape,

and, in fact, to belong to that incredible company of Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn over whom Thackeray let fall so delightfully the elegiac tear.

Anthologies are not edited in a truly catholic spirit, or they would contain this very remarkable sonnet: 

ON THE NONPAREIL.

  “None but himself can be his parallel.”

  With marble-coloured shoulders,—­and keen eyes,
    Protected by a forehead broad and white—­
    And hair cut close lest it impede the sight,
  And clenched hands, firm, and of punishing size,—­
  Steadily held, or motion’d wary-wise
    To hit or stop,—­and kerchief too drawn tight
    O’er the unyielding loins, to keep from flight
  The inconstant wind, that all too often