’Colley Cibber, Sir, was by no means a blockhead; but by arrogating to himself too much, he was in danger of losing that degree of estimation to which he was entitled.  His friends gave out that he intended his birth-day Odes should be bad:  but that was not the case, Sir; for he kept them many months by him, and a few years before he died he shewed me one of them, with great solicitude to render it as perfect as might be, and I made some corrections, to which he was not very willing to submit.  I remember the following couplet in allusion to the King and himself: 

     “Perch’d on the eagle’s soaring wing,
     The lowly linnet loves to sing.”

Sir, he had heard something of the fabulous tale of the wren sitting upon the eagle’s wing, and he had applied it to a linnet.  Cibber’s familiar style, however, was better than that which Whitehead has assumed.  Grand nonsense is insupportable.  Whitehead is but a little man to inscribe verses to players.

’Sir, I do not think Gray a first-rate poet.  He has not a bold imagination, nor much command of words.  The obscurity in which he has involved himself will not persuade us that he is sublime.  His Elegy in a Church-yard has a happy selection of images, but I don’t like what are called his great things.  His Ode which begins

     “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King,
     Confusion on thy banners wait!”

has been celebrated for its abruptness, and plunging into the subject all at once.  But such arts as these have no merit, unless when they are original.  We admire them only once; and this abruptness has nothing new in it.  We have had it often before.  Nay, we have it in the old song of Johnny Armstrong: 

     “Is there ever a man in all Scotland
     From the highest estate to the lowest degree,” &c.

And then, Sir,

     “Yes, there is a man in Westmoreland,
     And Johnny Armstrong they do him call.”

There, now, you plunge at once into the subject.  You have no previous narration to lead you to it.  The two next lines in that Ode are, I think, very good: 

     “Though fann’d by conquest’s crimson wing,
     They mock the air with idle state."’

Finding him in a placid humour, and wishing to avail myself of the opportunity which I fortunately had of consulting a sage, to hear whose wisdom, I conceived in the ardour of youthful imagination, that men filled with a noble enthusiasm for intellectual improvement would gladly have resorted from distant lands;—­I opened my mind to him ingenuously, and gave him a little sketch of my life, to which he was pleased to listen with great attention.