“New words find credit in these latter days,
    If neatly grafted on a Gallic phrase: 
    What Chaucer, Spenser, did, we scarce refuse
    To Dryden’s or to Pope’s maturer muse. 
    If you can add a little, say why not,
    As well as William Pitt and Walter Scott,
    Since they, by force of rhyme, and force of lungs,
    Enrich’d our island’s ill-united tongues? 
    ’Tis then, and shall be, lawful to present
    Reforms in writing as in parliament.

    “As forests shed their foliage by degrees,
    So fade expressions which in season please;
    And we and ours, alas! are due to fate,
    And works and words but dwindle to a date. 
    Though, as a monarch nods and commerce calls,
    Impetuous rivers stagnate in canals;
    Though swamps subdued, and marshes drain’d sustain
    The heavy ploughshare and the yellow grain;
    And rising ports along the busy shore
    Protect the vessel from old Ocean’s roar—­
    All, all must perish.  But, surviving last,
    The love of letters half preserves the past: 
    True,—­some decay, yet not a few survive,
    Though those shall sink which now appear to thrive,
    As custom arbitrates, whose shifting sway
    Our life and language must alike obey.”

I quote what follows chiefly for the sake of the note attached to it:—­

    “Satiric rhyme first sprang from selfish spleen. 
    You doubt?—­See Dryden, Pope, St. Patrick’s Dean.[8]

    “Blank verse is now with one consent allied
    To Tragedy, and rarely quits her side;
    Though mad Almanzor rhymed in Dryden’s days,
    No sing-song hero rants in modern plays;—­
    While modest Comedy her verse foregoes
    For jest and pun in very middling prose. 
    Not that our Bens or Beaumonts show the worse,
    Or lose one point because they wrote in verse;
    But so Thalia pleases to appear,—­
    Poor virgin!—­damn’d some twenty times a year!”

There is more of poetry in the following verses upon Milton than in any other passage throughout the Paraphrase:—­

    “‘Awake a louder and a loftier strain,’
    And, pray, what follows from his boiling brain? 
    He sinks to S * ’s level in a trice,
    Whose epic mountains never fail in mice! 
    Not so of yore awoke your mighty sire
    The tempered warblings of his master lyre;
    Soft as the gentler breathing of the lute,
    ‘Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit’
    He speaks; but, as his subject swells along,
    Earth, Heaven, and Hades, echo with the song.”

The annexed sketch contains some lively touches:—­

    “Behold him, Freshman!—­forced no more to groan
    O’er Virgil’s devilish verses[9], and—­his own;
    Prayers are too tedious, lectures too abstruse,
    He flies from T——­ll’s frown to ‘Fordham’s Mews;’