If with adventurous oar and ready sail, # [The following couplet, which was intended to have been introduced in the poem on the Alliance of Education and Government, is much too beautiful to be lost. MASON.] When love could teach a monarch to be wise, STANZAS TO MR. BENTLEY. Mr. Bentley had made a set of designs for Mr. Gray's Poems, particularly a headpiece to the Long Story. The original drawings are in the library at Strawberry Hill. IN silent gaze the tuneful choir among, Half pleased, half blushing, let the Muse admire, While Bentley leads her sister art along, And bids the pencil answer to the lyre. See, in their course, each transitory thought The tardy rhymes that used to linger on, In swifter measures animated run, And catch a lustre from his genuine flame. Ah! could they catch his strength, his easy grace, The energy of Pope they might efface, But not to one in this benighted age Is that diviner inspiration given, That burns in Shakspeare's or in Milton's page, As when, conspiring in the diamond's blaze, And dazzle with a luxury of light. Enough for me, if to some feeling breast SKETCH OF HIS OWN CHARACTER. WRITTEN IN 1761, AND FOUND IN ONE OF HIS POCKET BOOKS. Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune; He had not the method of making a fortune: Could love, and could hate, so was thought somewhat odd; No very great wit, he believed in a God: A post or a pension he did not desire, But left church and state to Charles Townshend and Squire*. * Squire] At that time Fellow of St. John's College, Cam bridge, and afterwards Bishop of St. David's. AMATORY LINES. This jeu d'esprit first appeared in Warton's Edition of Pope. WITH beauty, with pleasure surrounded, to languish- To close my dull eyes when I see it returning; Ah, say, fellow-swains, how these symptoms befell me? |