“And that’s enough—­then write and print so fast,—­
    If Satan take the hindmost, who’d be last? 
    They storm the types, they publish one and all,
    They leap the counter, and they leave the stall:—­
    Provincial maidens, men of high command,
    Yea, baronets, have ink’d the bloody hand! 
    Cash cannot quell them—­Pollio play’d this prank: 
    (Then Phoebus first found credit in a bank;)
    Not all the living only, but the dead
    Fool on, as fluent as an Orpheus’ head! 
    Damn’d all their days, they posthumously thrive,
    Dug up from dust, though buried when alive! 
    Reviews record this epidemic crime,
    Those books of martyrs to the rage for rhyme
    Alas! woe worth the scribbler, often seen
    In Morning Post or Monthly Magazine! 
    There lurk his earlier lays, but soon, hot-press’d,
    Behold a quarto!—­tarts must tell the rest! 
    Then leave, ye wise, the lyre’s precarious chords
    To muse-mad baronets or madder lords,
    Or country Crispins, now grown somewhat stale,
    Twin Doric minstrels, drunk with Doric ale! 
    Hark to those notes, narcotically soft,
    The cobbler-laureates sing to Capel Lofft!"[12]

From these select specimens, which comprise, altogether, little more than an eighth of the whole poem, the reader may be enabled to form some notion of the remainder, which is, for the most part, of a very inferior quality, and, in some parts, descending to the depths of doggerel.  Who, for instance, could trace the hand of Byron in such “prose, fringed with rhyme,” as the following?—­

    “Peace to Swift’s faults! his wit hath made them pass
    Unmatch’d by all, save matchless Hudibras,
    Whose author is perhaps the first we meet
    Who from our couplet lopp’d two final feet;
    Nor less in merit than the longer line
    This measure moves, a favourite of the Nine.

    “Though at first view, eight feet may seem in vain
    Form’d, save in odes, to bear a serious strain,
    Yet Scott has shown our wondering isle of late
    This measure shrinks not from a theme of weight,
    And, varied skilfully, surpasses far
    Heroic rhyme, but most in love or war,
    Whose fluctuations, tender or sublime,
    Are curb’d too much by long recurring rhyme.

    “In sooth, I do not know, or greatly care
    To learn who our first English strollers were,
    Or if—­till roofs received the vagrant art—­
    Our Muse—­like that of Thespis—­kept a cart. 
    But this is certain, since our Shakspeare’s days,
    There’s pomp enough, if little else, in plays;
    Nor will Melpomene ascend her throne
    Without high heels, white plume, and Bristol stone.

    “Where is that living language which could claim
    Poetic more, as philosophic fame,
    If all our bards, more patient of delay,
    Would stop like Pope to polish by the way?”