Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,
Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights

At joust and tournament; then marshall'd feast,
Served up in hall with sewers and seneschals."

While, still preserving his proud confidence in his subject, he adds:

"Me of these

Nor skill'd, nor studious, higher argument
Remains, sufficient of itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing
Depress'd; and much they may if all be mine,
Not hers, who brings it nightly to my ear."

Pope, besides many hints and schemes of intended works, has left behind him the complete plan of an epic poem, to be written in blank verse, on the subject of the Trojan Brutus. Dr. Johnson gave Mr. Langton a catalogue of books which he had projected, amounting to forty-four in prose, and five in poetry. Hayley contemplated a grand national poem about King John's barons and Magna Charta. Mr. Coleridge, in our own days, is understood to be so voluminous an author of unwritten books as to be obliged to keep a copious catalogue for the purposes of reference to them.

"Half of your book is to an Index grown;

You give your books contents, your readers none."

""Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true," that a mind so richly stored as his should impart so little of its intellectual opulence. His overloaded head is like

an overfull bottle of nectar, whose particles, in their contention for preference of escape, do mutually "choke their utterance."

STANZAS TO PUNCHINELLO.

THOU lignum-vitæ Roscius, who
Dost the old vagrant stage renew,
Peerless, inimitable Punchinello!

The Queen of smiles is quite outdone
By thee, all-glorious king of fun,

Thou grinning, giggling, laugh-extorting fellow!

At other times mine ear is wrung
Whene'er I hear the trumpet's tongue,

Waking associations melancholic;

But that which heralds thee recalls

All childhood's joys and festivals,

And makes the heart rebound with freak and frolic.

Ere of thy face I get a snatch,

O with what boyish glee I catch

Thy twittering, cackling, bubbling, squeaking gibberSweeter than syren voices-fraught

With richer merriment than aught

That drops from witling mouths, though utter'd glibber!

What wag was ever known before

To keep the circle in a roar,

Nor wound the feelings of a single hearer?

Engrossing all the jibes and jokes,

Unenvied by the duller folks,

A harmless wit-an unmalignant jeerer.

The upturn'd eyes I love to trace
Of wondering mortals, when their face
Is all alight with an expectant gladness;
To mark the flickering giggle first,
The growing grin-the sudden burst,
And universal shout of merry madness.

I love those sounds to analyse,

From childhood's shrill ecstatic cries,

To age's chuckle with its coughing after ;

To see the grave and the genteel

Rein in awhile the mirth they feel,

Then loose their muscles, and let out the laughter.

Sometimes I note a hen-peck'd wight,
Enjoying thy marital might,

To him a beatific beau idéal;

He counts each crack on Judy's pate,

Then homeward creeps to cogitate

The difference 'twixt dramatic wives and real.

But, Punch, thou 'rt ungallant and rude

In plying thy persuasive wood;

Remember that thy cudgel's girth is fuller

Than that compassionate, thumb-thick,

Establish'd wife-compelling stick,

Made legal by the dictum of Judge Buller.

When the officious doctor hies

To cure thy spouse, there's no surprise

Thou shouldst receive him with nose-tweaking grappling;

Nor can we wonder that the mob

Encores each crack upon his nob,

When thou art feeing him with oaken sapling.

As for our common enemy

Old Nick, we all rejoice to see

The coup de grace that silences his wrangle;

But, lo, Jack Ketch!-ah, welladay!

Dramatic justice claims its prey,

And thou in hempen handkerchief must dangle.

Now helpless hang those arms which once

Rattled such music on the sconce;

Hush'd is that tongue which late out-jested Yorick;

That hunch behind is shrugg'd no more,

No longer heaves that paunch before,

Which swagg'd with such a pleasantry plethorick.

But Thespian deaths are transient woes,
And still less durable are those

Suffer'd by lignum-vitæ malefactors;

Thou wilt return, alert, alive,

And long, oh long may'st thou survive,

First of head-breaking and side-splitting actors!

AN ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE CAUSES OF THE DECLINE OF BRITISH COMEDY.

No. I.

NOTHING is more common than to hear lamentable complaints of the downfal of the British Drama, and nothing is more rare than to find that the authors of these doleful exclamations have bestowed any pains in investigating the extent, causes, or consequences of the calamity they deplore. Like other ill news, the dictum flies apace from mouth to mouth, and its circulators are too busy in spreading the report to stop to analyze its truth. The assertion, however, is neither

limited to the present time, nor to the stage itself; for men, in all ages, have been prone to speak in raptures of the ancient poets, dramatists, painters, and historians, while they bewailed the inferiority of their own days; to reason as if the progress of knowledge were retrograde, and to indulge in gloomy reveries, as if the world, instead of advancing in intellectual refinement, were relapsing into darkness and barbarism. "There are some prejudices," as Dr. Aikin justly observes,* "which, when once broken through, leave the mind in astonishment that it could ever have submitted to them. Such is that of annexing authority to antiquity. In consequence of a false analogy, we associate the idea of age and experience to the circumstance of having lived long ago; and thus we invert the proper notice of the wisdom of ages,' and look for it at the wrong end." He proceeds to remark, that, "in fact, all the authority which accumulated knowledge and experience can bestow, is on the side of a modern, when compared with an ancient."-Yet few old men will allow the operation of this principle upon their contemporaries; although they are very ready to admit the conjunctive progress of improvement with the march of time, so far as it respects themselves. To men of this sort every thing appears to be woefully altered for the worse, since the days of their youth they are sailing from the land of promise, and fancy it is receding from them; they are changed themselves, and imagine that the world is altered, as

Letters to his Son, vol. ii. page 89.