There are mincing women, mewing,
(Like cats, who amant miserè,*)
Of their own virtue, and pursuing
Their gentler sisters to that ruin,

Without which-what were chastity.+

* One of the attributes in Linnæus's description of the Cat. To a similar cause the caterwauling of more than one species of this genus is to be referred ;-except, indeed, that the poor quadruped is compelled to quarrel with its own pleasures, whilst the biped is supposed only to quarrel with those of others.

What would this husk and excuse for a virtue be

Lawyers-judges-old hobnobbers
Are there bailiffs-chancellors-
Bishops-great and little robbers—
Rhymesters-pamphleteers-stock-jobbers—
Men of glory in the wars,—

Things whose trade is, over ladies

To lean, and flirt, and stare, and simper, Till all that is divine in woman

Grows cruel, courteous, smooth, inhuman, Crucified 'twixt a smile and whimper.

Thrusting, toiling, wailing, moiling,
Frowning, preaching-such a riot!
Each with never-ceasing labour,
Whilst he thinks he cheats his neighbour,
Cheating his own heart of quiet.

And all these meet at levees ;

Dinners convivial and political ;— Suppers of epic poets ;-teas, Where small talk dies in agonies;Breakfasts professional and critical;

Lunches and snacks so aldermanic

That one would furnish forth ten dinners,
Where reigns a Cretan-tongued panic,

Lest news Russ, Dutch, or Alemannie
Should make some losers, and some winners

At conversazioni-balls

Conventicles and drawing-roomsCourts of law-committees-calls Of a morning-clubs-book-stalls— Churches-masquerades—and tombs.

And this is Hell-and in this smother All are damnable and damned; Each one damning, damns the other; They are damned by one another,

By none other are they damned.

'Tis a lie to say, "God damns !"*

Where was Heaven's Attorney General
When they first gave out such flams?
Let there be an end of shams,

They are mines of poisonous mineral.

without its kernel prostitution, or the kernel prostitution without this husk of a virtue? I wonder the women of the town do not form an association, like the Society for the Suppression of Vice, for the support of what may be called the "King, Church, and Constitution" of their order. But this subject is almost too horrible for a joke. * This libel on our national oath, and this accusation of

For Peter did not know the town,
But thought, as country readers do,
For half a guinea or a crown,
He bought oblivion or renown
From God's own voice in a review.

All Peter did on this occasion

Was, writing some sad stuff in prose.
It is a dangerous invasion
When poets criticise; their station
Is to delight, not pose.

The Devil then sent to Leipsic fair,

For Born's translation of Kant's book; A world of words, tail foremost, where Right-wrong-false-true-and foul-and fair, As in a lottery-wheel are shook.

Five thousand crammed octavo pages
Of German psychologics,-he
Who his furor verborum assuages
Thereon, deserves just seven months' wages
More than will e'er be due to me.

I looked on them nine several days,

And then I saw that they were bad; A friend, too, spoke in their dispraise,— He never read them ;-with amaze

I found Sir William Drummond had.

When the book came, the Devil sent
It to P. Verbovale,+ Esquire,
With a brief note of compliment,
By that night's Carlisle mail. It went,
And set his soul on fire.

Fire, which ex luce præbens fumum,

Made him beyond the bottom see

Of truth's clear well-when I and you Ma'am, Go, as we shall do, subter humum,

We may know more than he.

Now Peter ran to seed in soul
Into a walking paradox ;
For he was neither part nor whole,
Nor good, nor bad-nor knave nor fool,
-Among the woods and rocks.

Furious he rode, where late he ran,
Lashing and spurring his tame hobby;
Turned to a formal puritan,
A solemn and unsexual man,-

He half believed White Obi.

This steed in vision he would ride,

High trotting over nine-inch bridges, With Flibbertigibbet, imp of pride, Mocking and mowing by his sideA mad-brained goblin for a guide

Over corn-fields, gates, and hedges.

*Vox populi, vox dei. As Mr. Godwin truly observes of a more famous saying, of some merit as a popular maxim, but totally destitute of philosophical accuracy.

+ Quasi, Qui valet verba :-i. e. all the words which have been, are, or may be expended by, for, against, with, or on him. A sufficient proof of the utility of this history. Peter's progenitor who selected this name seems to have possessed a pure anticipated cognition of the nature and modesty of this ornament of his posterity.

After these ghastly rides, he came

Home to his heart, and found from thence Much stolen of its accustomed flame; His thoughts grew weak, drowsy, and lame Of their intelligence.

To Peter's view, all seemed one hue;
He was no whig, he was no tory;
No Deist and no Christian he ;-
He got so subtle, that to be
Nothing, was all his glory.

One single point in his belief
From his organisation sprung,
The heart-enrooted faith, the chief
Ear in his doctrines' blighted sheaf,
That "happiness is wrong ;"

So thought Calvin and Dominic ;

So think their fierce successors, who
Even now would neither stint nor stick
Our flesh from off our bones to pick,
If they might "do their do."

His morals thus were undermined :-
The old Peter-the hard, old Potter
Was born anew within his mind;
He grew dull, harsh, sly, unrefined,
As when he tramped beside the Otter *.
In the death hues of agony

Lambently flashing from a fish,
Now Peter felt amused to see
Shades like a rainbow's rise and flee,
Mixed with a certain hungry wish.†

"My wife wants one.-Let who will bury

This mangled corpse! And I and you, My dearest Soul, will then make merry, As the Prince Regent did with Sherry,Ay-and at last desert me too."

A famous river in the new Atlantis of the Dynastophylic Pantisocratists.

See the description of the beautiful colours produced during the agonising death of a number of trout, in the fourth part of a long poem in blank verse, published within a few years. That poem contains curious evidence of the gradual hardening of a strong but circumscribed sensibility, of the perversion of a penetrating but panic stricken understanding. The author might have derived a lesson which he had probably forgotten from these sweet and sublime verses.

This lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,

Taught both by what she shows and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride

With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

Nature.