XIV.

Oh, when thou writest by Aladdin’s lamp,
With such a giant genius at command,
          Forever at thy stamp,
To fill thy treasury from Fairy Land,
When haply thou might’st ask the pearly hand
Of some great British Vizier’s eldest daughter,
          Tho’ princes sought her,
And lead her in procession hymeneal,
Oh, why dost thou remain a Beau Ideal! 
Why stay, a ghost, on the Lethean Wharf,
Envelop’d in Scotch mist and gloomy fogs? 
Why, but because thou art some puny Dwarf,
Some hopeless Imp, like Biquet with the Tuft,
Fearing, for all thy wit, to be rebuff’d,
Or bullied by our great reviewing Gogs?

XV.

      What in this masquing age
Maketh Unknowns so many and so shy? 
    What but the critic’s page? 
One hath a cast, he hides from the world’s eye;
Another hath a wen,—­he won’t show where;
        A third has sandy hair,
A hunch upon his back, or legs awry,
Things for a vile reviewer to espy! 
Another hath a mangel-wurzel nose,—­
        Finally, this is dimpled,
  Like a pale crumpet face, or that is pimpled,
Things for a monthly critic to expose—­
Nay, what is thy own case—­that being small,
Thou choosest to be nobody at all!

XVI.

Well, thou art prudent, with such puny bones—­
    E’en like Elshender, the mysterious elf,
    That shadowy revelation of thyself—­
To build thee a small hut of haunted stones—­
For certainly the first pernicious man
That ever saw thee, would quickly draw thee
In some vile literary caravan—­
          Shown for a shilling
          Would be thy killing,
Think of Crachami’s miserable span! 
No tinier frame the tiny spark could dwell in
          Than there it fell in—­
But when she felt herself a show, she tried
To shrink from the world’s eye, poor dwarf! and died!

XVII.

    O since it was thy fortune to be born
A dwarf on some Scotch Inch, and then to flinch
From all the Gog-like jostle of great men,
Still with thy small crow pen
Amuse and charm thy lonely hours forlorn—­
Still Scottish story daintily adorn,
  Be still a shade—­and when this age is fled,
When we poor sons and daughters of reality
  Are in our graves forgotten and quite dead,
And Time destroys our mottoes of morality—­
The lithographic hand of Old Mortality
Shall still restore thy emblem on the stone,
          A featureless death’s head,
And rob Oblivion ev’n of the Unknown!

ODE TO JOSEPH GRIMALDI, SENIOR.

“This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.”
Twelfth Night.