attempt to supply. The pieces it has already produced in our language, are the Session of the Poets, by Sir John Suckling; another Session, by an anonymous author, in the first volume of State Poems; the Trial for the Bays, by Lord Rochester; and the Election of a Poet Laureat, by Shef field, Duke of Buckingham. They are for the most part vulgar and poor, with that strange affectation of slovenliness, which the lower species of satire, in those times, appears to have mistaken for a vigorous negligence or gallant undress. But the author is getting on his critical ground again, and forgets that he must now be regarded as having entered his own road of pretension, and be criticised as a poet himself. The necessity is rather perplexing to one who has been making so free with others, and who scarcely considers himself as having finished his own studies in poetry; but as it is,—he has subjoined to the Feast of the Poets a few little pieces of a graver description, in or der that those, who in return for being lightly regarded, are eager to make accusations of levity, may see that he has at least a taste for more serious enjoyment. Should a state of health, not very accommodating, continue to allow him in his imprisonment the use of his pen, it is his intention, by the beginning of next year, to bring out a piece of some length, with which he is varying less agreeable studies, and in which he would attempt to reduce to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate harmony of the English heroic, THE FEAST OF THE POETS. T'OTHER day, as Apollo sat pitching his darts Through the clouds of November, by fits and by starts, He began to consider how long it had been, Since the bards of Old England had all been rung in. 'I think,' said the God, recollecting, (and then. He fell twiddling a sunbeam as I may my pen), That since Dryden's fine verses and Milton's sublime, I have fairly been sick of their sing-song and rhyme. B |