“Where sculptured temples once appeared to sight,
    Now dismal ruins meet the moon’s pale light,—­
    Where regal pomp once shone with gorgeous ray,
    And kings successive held their transient sway;—­
    Where once the priest his sacred victims led
    And on the altars their warm lifeblood shed,—­
    Where swollen rivers once had amply flowed
    And splendid galleys down the stream had rowed,
    A dreary wilderness now meets the view,
    And nought but Memory can trace the clue!”

The poor little schoolboy’s muse was perhaps quite of the pedestrian order:  but so also, the critics said, had been stern old Dr. Johnson’s in his “London.”

Mere school-exercises (whereof I have some antique copybooks before me), cannot be held to count for much as early literature; though I know not why some of my Greek Iambic translations of the Psalms and Shakespeare, as also sundry very respectable versions of English poems into Latin Sapphics and Alcaics still among my archives, should not have been shrined—­as they were offered at the time—­in Dr. Haig Brown’s Carthusian Anthology.  However somehow these have escaped printer’s ink,—­the only true elixir vitae—­and we must therefore suppose them not quite worthy to be bracketed with the classical versification of Buchanan or even of Mr. John Milton,—­albeit actually superior to sundry of the aforesaid Anthologia Carthusiana; so of these we will say nothing.

Of other sorts of schoolboy literaria whereof from time to time I was guilty let me save here (by way of change) one or two of my trivial humoristics:  here is one, not seen in print till now; “Sapphics to my Umbrella,—­written on a very rainy day,” in 1827.  N.B.  If Canning in his Eton days immortalised sapphically a knifegrinder, why shouldn’t a young Carthusian similarly celebrate his gingham?

“Valued companion of my expeditions,
Wanderings, and my street perambulations,
What can be more deserving of my praises

                Than my umbrella?

“Under thine ample covering rejoicing,
(All the ‘canaille’ tumultuously running)
While the rain streams and patters from the housetops,

                Slow and majestic,

“I trudge along unwetted, though an ocean
Pours from the clouds, as if some Abernethy
Had given all the nubilary regions

                Purges cathartic!

“Others run on in piteous condition,
Black desperation painted in their faces,
While the full flood descends in very pailfuls

                Streaming upon them.

“Yea, ’tis as if some cunning necromancer
Had drawn a circle magically round me,
Till like the wretched victim of Kehama,

                (Southey’s abortion)

“Nothing like liquor ever could approach me! 
But it is thou, disinterested comrade,
Bearest the rainy weather uncomplaining,

                Oh, my umbrella!