it signify whether a poor dear dead dunce is to be stuck up in Surgeons' or in Stationers' Hall? Is it so bad to unearth his bones as his blunders? Is it not better to gibbet his body on a heath, than his soul in an octavo? "We know what we are, but we know not what we may be;" and it is to be hoped we never shall know, if a man who has passed through life with a sort of éclat, is to find himself a mountebank on the other side of Styx, and made, like poor Joe Blackett, the laughing-stock of purgatory. The plea of publication is to provide for the child; now, might not some of this "Sutor ultra Crepidam's" friends and seducers have done a decent action without inveigling Pratt into biography? And then his inscription split into so many modicums!" To the Duchess of Somuch, the Right Hon. So-and-So, and Mrs. and Miss Somebody, these volumes are," &c. &c.-why, this is doling out the "soft milk of dedication" in gills, there is but a quart, and he divides it among a dozen. Why, Pratt, hadst thou not a puff left? Dost thou think six families of distinction can share this in quiet? There is a child, a book, and a dedication: send the girl to her grace, the volumes to the grocer, and the dedication to the devil.

[In the original MS.

59.-Page 240, line 4.
Some rhyming peer

"Some rhyming peer-Carlisle or Carysfort."

To which is subjoined this note:-" Of 'John Joshua, Earl of Carysfort,' I know nothing at present, but from an advertisement in an old newspaper of certain Poems and Tragedies by his Lordship, which I saw by accident in the Morea. Being a rhymer himself, he will forgive the liberty I take with his name, seeing, as he must, how very commodious it is at the close of that couplet; and as for what follows and goes before, let him place it to the account of the other Thane; since I cannot, under these circumstances, augur pro or con the contents of his 'foolscap crown octavos.'"-John Joshua Proby, first Earl of Carysfort, was joint postmaster-general in 1805, envoy to Berlin in 1806, and ambassador to Petersburgh in 1807. Besides his poems, he published two pamphlets, to show the necessity of universal suffrage and short parliaments. He died in 1828.]

60.-Page 240, line 4.

there's plenty of the sort

Here will Mr. Gifford allow me to introduce once more to his notice the sole survivor, the "ultimus Romanorum," the last of the Cruscanti -"Edwin" the "profound" by our Lady of Punishment! here he is, as lively as in the days of "well said Baviad the Correct.' I thought Fitzgerald had been the tail of poesy; but, alas! he is only the penultimate.

A FAMILIAR EPISTLE TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING CHRONICLE.

"What reams of paper, floods of ink,"

Do some men spoil, who never think!
And so perhaps you'll say of me,
In which your readers may agree.

Still I write on, and tell you why;
Nothing's so bad, you can't deny,
But may instruct or entertain

Without the risk of giving pain, &c. &c.

ON SOME MODERN QUACKS AND REFORMISTS.

In tracing of the human mind

Through all its various courses,
Though strange, 'tis true, we often find
It knows not its resources:

And men through life assume a par
For which no talents they possess,
Yet wonder that, with all their art,
They meet no better with success, &c. &c.

61.-Page 240, line 23.

Ye, who aspire to "build the lofty rhyme,

See Milton's Lycidas.]

62.-Page 240, line 33.

If you will breed this bastard of your brains,

Minerva being the first by Jupiter's head-piece, and a variety of cqually unaccountable parturitions upon earth, such as Madoc, &c. &c.

63.-Page 241, line 12.

And furnish food for critics, or their quills.

"A crust for the critics."-Bayes, in the "Rehearsal.”

64.-Page 241, line 16.

As yawning waiters fly

And the "waiters" are the only fortunate people who can "fly" from them; all the rest, viz. the sad subscribers to the "Literary Fund," being compelled, by courtesy, to sit out the recitation without a hope of exclaiming, "Sic" (that is, by choking Fitz. with bad wine, or worse poetry) "me servavit Apollo!"

65.-Page 241, line 16.

Fitzscribble's lungs;

["Fitzscribble," originally "Fitzgerald."]

66.-Page 242, line 6.

"To die like Cato," leapt into the Thames!

On his table were found these words: "What Cato did, and Addison approved, cannot be wrong." But Addison did not "approve;' " and if

VOL. I.

ន

he had, it would not have mended the matter. He had invited his daughter on the same water-party; but Miss Budgell, by some accident, escaped this last paternal attention. Thus fell the sycophant of "Atticus," and the enemy of Pope!-[Eustace Budgell, a friend and relative of Addison's, "leapt into the Thames" to escape prosecution for forging the will of Dr. Tindal, in which Eustace had provided himself with a legacy of two thousand pounds. "We talked (says Boswell) of a man's drowning himself. I put the case of Eustace Budgell. 'Suppose, sir,' said I, 'that a man is absolutely sure that, if he lives a few days longer, he shall be detected in a fraud, the consequence of which will be utter disgrace, and expulsion from society. JOHNSON. 'Then, sir, let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil, where he is known.'"

67.-Page 242, line 15.

Dosed with vile drams on Sunday he was found,

If" dosed with," &c. be censured as low, I beg leave to refer to the original for something still lower; and if any reader will translate "Minxerit in patrios cineres," &c. into a decent couplet, I will insert said couplet in lieu of the present.

THE CURSE OF MINERVA.

-"Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas

Immolat, ct pœnam scelerato ex sanguine sumit."

Eneid, lib. xii.

INTRODUCTION TO THE CURSE OF MINERVA.

+

MR. HOBHOUSE relates that, during a ten weeks' residence at Athens, Lord Byron and himself devoted a portion of every day to the contemplation of the relics of Grecian art. Full of classical enthusiasm, and feeling how much the locality and the monuments exalted one another, the poet was indignant at the spoliation of the Parthenon. In this mood he gave vent at Athens, in March, 1811, to the fierce philippic on Lord Elgin, which he prepared to publish on his return to Englan!, and suppressed upon the remonstrance of the friends of his victim. He often asserted that he was free from malice, and that his satires were the product of a momentary spleen, but he also believed that they ha greater spirit than all the rest of his writings, and his opinion of their vigour induced him to print them when the animosity was gone. It was easy on these occasions to turn him from his purpose, and the success o the two first cantos of "Childe Harold" removed much of the temptation to do to Lord Elgin as Lord Elgin had done to the Parthenon. Th poet had stumbled upon another road to fame, and could afford to be generous, or more correctly, to be just. The marvels of sculpture which Lord Elgin brought from Athens were wrested, not from classic Greece, but from barbarism and decay. They were purchased by our government in 1816 for thirty-five thousand pounds, and placed in the British Museum, where they will prolong the evidence of Grecian genius. The first authentic edition of "The Curse of Minerva" was published in 1828, but in a letter of Lord Byron's, written in March, 1816, he speaks of a miserable and stolen copy, as having been printed in a Magazine. The opening paragraphs, which were considered by some of his friends the finest verses he composed during his absence from England, he intended to append, under the title of a "Descriptive Fragment," to a future edition of "Childe Harold." He changed his purpose, and a little later made them the commencement of the third canto of "The Corsair." These splendid lines are pronounced by travellers a perfect picture of the scene, and they far transcend any other portion of "The Curse of Minerva," which contains, however, many vigorous couplets. Next in excellence to the brilliant beginning is the concluding paragraph, which depicts with poetic energy the possible consequences of a French invasion of our shores. The perverse pleasure he took in startling the public with anti-patriotic ebullitions, could alone have suggested the wild assertion that we deserved to be swept by the whirlwind we had raised. The strife, which he pretends originated with England, was kindled by the guilty ambition of France, and it is not we who were answerable for the miseries of wars which we waged in defence of ourselves and our allies.