Hast thou ever paused, in the jollity of thy heart, to ruminate on thy occasional insipience and consider how unbeseeming it is to make 50 ght account of the claims of poetic minorities as to exclude them from thy territory? What dust thou expect to reap thereby? Nothing but destitution of humour.
What virtue is there in making versifiers like unto those who bring the pestilence into a country, as Homer write th that the plague w sent into the camp of the Greeks by Apollo?
Hast thou observed that since the date of thy circumvention no rhymer worthy of the name durst set his foot" within thy domain, so truly hast thou empoisoned his existence? Or was thy ire roused by the profane ity brought into thy sanctum by certain discordant rhymsters of whom 1t may be pondered that "necessarium ad aeternam salute quod discount grammaticum et prosodiam ex poetis si cut sunt Ludoyicus Wyndham, Felicia Hemans, Isaacus Watts, Nos et alli?" Rhymers can also break jest or two for the delectation of thy readers even when they are kept speechless in a purgatory of ostracism. And those that will scoff at them, let them be accounted kill-joys, feast-troublers and marrers of mirth.
Or is it because they have smacked their lips at each other in mutual disapprobation?
But, I. P, what about the semirevolution by which the Royal Academy appears to be convulsed? Does there not loom behind it the eternal conflict of artistic theories. of the sensuous and the imaginative elements, of technical skill and the unbridled expression of ideas, akin to all the fine arts? In the exercise of their prerogative, are not the grave and austere wielders of brush, paint and canvas, now holding forth and turmoiling themselves?
But there is an explanation of all this, in that poets like philosophers are difficult subjects for reproduction, sáve when their deformed outward appearance is so rubbed over or concealed as to justify a verdict of incorrect perception?
Whereunto does this mild expostulation tend? That thou, LP. Shouldst. without further disdain, reopen thy repertory, and, like Silenus, welcome the following octave and sextet, the object whereof is to unriddle the enigma that lies at the bottom of the recent storm in the daubers' pot.
IMPROMPIU
(Inscribed to that inelyte Academy yelept Royal) That which a thing of beauty is to Thee May seem to di ant vision the reverse, And what from genius flows bespeak far worse Than child of flippant medioer Who will the test of real worth decree?
Make answer, Muse! and help us now rehearse Our visual skill.. and fallacy disperse That blinking virtuosos may agree! Of truthful art on canvas to succeed, Had never modern artists all such need, 3 Meetér for them their venturous hand to try At fresh creations, and with tactful eye.
But they who Poets' forms would paint or trace "Must shift their point of view... from paunch to face!
Jack
AND JILL.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.