leaning, perhaps, towards school recollections[6], may have had a share in prompting his preference of the Horatian Paraphrase, is by no means improbable;—­at least, that it was enough to lead him, untried as he had yet been in the new path, to content himself, for the present, with following up his success in the old.  We have seen, indeed, that the manuscript of the two Cantos of Childe Harold had, previously to its being placed in the hands of Mr. Dallas, been submitted by the noble author to the perusal of some friend—­the first and only one, it appears, who at that time had seen them.  Who this fastidious critic was, Mr. Dallas has not mentioned; but the sweeping tone of censure in which he conveyed his remarks was such as, at any period of his career, would have disconcerted the judgment of one, who, years after, in all the plenitude of his fame, confessed, that “the depreciation of the lowest of mankind was more painful to him than the applause of the highest was pleasing."[7]

Though on every thing that, after his arrival at the age of manhood, he produced, some mark or other of the master-hand may be traced; yet, to print the whole of his Paraphrase of Horace, which extends to nearly 800 lines, would be, at the best, but a questionable compliment to his memory.  That the reader, however, may be enabled to form some opinion of a performance, which—­by an error or caprice of judgment, unexampled, perhaps, in the annals of literature—­its author, for a time, preferred to the sublime musings of Childe Harold, I shall here select a few such passages from the Paraphrase as may seem calculated to give an idea as well of its merits as its defects.

The opening of the poem is, with reference to the original, ingenious:—­

    “Who would not laugh, if Lawrence, hired to grace
    His costly canvass with each flatter’d face,
    Abused his art, till Nature, with a blush,
    Saw cits grow centaurs underneath his brush? 
    Or should some limner join, for show or sale,
    A maid of honour to a mermaid’s tail? 
    Or low Dubost (as once the world has seen)
    Degrade God’s creatures in his graphic spleen? 
    Not all that forced politeness, which defends
    Fools in their faults, could gag his grinning friends. 
    Believe me, Moschus, like that picture seems
    The book, which, sillier than a sick man’s dreams,
    Displays a crowd of figures incomplete,
    Poetic nightmares, without head or feet.”

The following is pointed, and felicitously expressed:—­

    “Then glide down Grub Street, fasting and forgot,
    Laugh’d into Lethe by some quaint Review,
    Whose wit is never troublesome till—­true.”

Of the graver parts, the annexed is a favourable specimen:—­