I'll only add a postscript short, The last must here be mention'd first- Their glorious deeds were all rehears❜d— One, "firm as rocks," was orthodox, I think that one had done much better, And how John Adams meant, by zounds, A western man jump'd up in doubt, He caught a glimpse of cloven foot, Oh, do not take your specks, Smyth out, The cat has clearly turn'd about, And jump'd from out the bag, You've run your friend upon a ledge, As dead as Smith could kill with sledge, "Oh that mine enemy would write A bet, this day. But here my muse her wing "maun cower,' They bloom as fresh as when full blown, His body's worn by ruthless time, One word for what came after; Some got a squeeze, and some a jog, For almost half an hour, A Such abstinence would break them up, The girls came tripping down the stairs, POETS AND POETRY. Poetry's unnatural; no man ever talked in poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin', or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows. Never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.-Weller, senior. MR. EDITOR:-Although named after the wisest man that ever lived, I am afraid that you will think me very foolish to be troubling you with my complaints; yet seeing that my great namesake did not always the thing that was right, and moreover, that you did not despise my former communication, but put it down in black and white, I am tempted again to address you. I have given up travelling as I told you, but somehow or other, this world is so strangely constituted, that do as we will, there must be something to perplex and annoy us, and how to get rid of my present grievance I cannot divine. It is therefore that I fly to you in my distress, hoping that your superior wisdom may suggest some way of relief. Almost all your contributors, I observe, stick up a kind of sign-board at the top of their writings, and you see I have followed their example; I think it a good custom. It answers a useful purpose, because your readers may be considered as a sort of travellers, who like to know which way they are going. Whether they be in search of business or pleasure, they can take the one road or the other; according to the sign, and by these useful contrivances, they can always know where to stop for "cakes and, beer," or more solid fare. Let nobody stop with me, who cannot be satisfied with the humblest cheer. When I tell you, Mr. Editor, that I am like the man who never made but one rhyme in his life, and that was "Thumpin and Dumpling," missing it then too, you may well wonder that poetry should be my theme; but I have been so much vexed and worried by poets, that I am almost as mad as Hogarth's "enraged musician ;" and, if I may judge from the manner in which they have beset you, I have no doubt, if you could come out openly, you would wish the whole fraternity at the bottom of the sea; and I have a shrewd notion that you think with my Lord Byron, that if they have drunk of the true Castalian, "it has a villainous twang." I have somewhere read of an old gentleman, who estimated his books according to their ponderousness. The folios were the best because they gave him the soundest naps; and, for my part, I never read poetry but for the purpose of going to sleep; for positively, I can hardly understand half of it. The words are so transposed for the sake of the rhyme, and the thoughts are so far-fetched, that it fatigues me to death to find out what the writer means. Blank verse especially, is to me, more incomprehensible than the demonstration we used to call at school-Hot Hell-and shall I confess it? Yes, and a thousand others would do the same, if they were as candid as I am. I never could get through the divine Milton in my life. As old Tom Mann Randolph once said, of his opponent in debate, "I cannot follow the gentleman; he is too erratic-he shakes hands with the comets." I never attempt to read Paradise Lost, without being convinced of my fallen state, when I awake, and find myself on the floor. Is there any conceivable subject, much less the devil and his imps, upon which human attention can be kept awake through twelve tedious books? If I could read by steam, I should feel as if I were dragging along twelve burthen cars. I have selected Milton to illustrate my feelings, because he is of unquestioned eminence; and if it be thus with me at the fountain head, what must I endure upon the tempest-tost ocean of modern poetry? By-the-by, blank verse! What is the meaning of the word blank? Like the fellow who had been writing prose all his life, without knowing it, here have I been reading blank verse all my life, without once inquiring into its meaning. I suppose I was satisfied from not comprehending it, that it was all a blank; but let us see what the dictionary says, for people now-a-days, I believe, are fed upon the dictionary. Blank-white, unwritten, confused, without rhyme; truly, an excellent definition! It is confused indeed, and Milton's verse is, to use his own words, "confusion worse confounded." Can any sober man like you or I, Mr. Editor, read his account of Hell and the Devil, Sin and Death, Old Night and Chaos, without feeling his head a perfect chaos? What monstrous conceptions! What inconceivable descriptions! What unutterable horrors! Was the man mad? No wonder he was blind; for the bare imagination of such sights as he describes was enough to make any body blind. Indeed, it seems to me to be absolutely necessary to be blind, or at least to shut one's eyes, to imagine such a multitude of devils-more I dare swear than "vast hell can hold." Just shut your eyes for a moment, and observe the variety of objects you will see of all shapes and sizes. It must have been in this way that his imagination "bodied forth the forms of things unknown." Some of his descriptions are really so ludicrous that one cannot forbear laughing outright; I am sure I cannot. For instance, Sin, in giving an account of her birth, says, that all at once Satan had the head-ache, and his head threw forth flames thick and fast, till the left side of it opened, and out she jumped-a goddess armed; what followed then, is too horrible for decent people to talk about. Again, when Moloch proposes to attack the Almighty with "infernal thunder, and for lightning to shoot black fire and horror," among the angels, who can refrain from smiling at this new kind of ammunition. I should think black fire must be the least destructive sort. I know that I hate to see my fire look black of a cold day, and as for horror, where it was to |