r modern or ancient.
His was the moor and the tarn, the recess in the mountain, the woodland
Scatter'd with trees far and wide, trees never too solemn or lofty,
Never entangled with plants overrunning the villager's foot-path.
Equable was he and plain, but wandering a little in wisdom,
Sometimes flying from blood and sometimes pouring it freely.
Yet he was English at heart. If his words were too many; if Fancy's
Furniture lookt rather scant in a whitewasht homely apartment;
If in his rural designs there is sameness and tameness; if often
Feebleness is there for breadth; if his pencil wants rounding and pointing;
Few of this age or the last stand out on the like elevation.
There is a sheepfold he rais'd which my memory loves to revisit,
Sheepfold whose wall shall endure when there is not a stone of the palace.
Still there are walking on earth many poets whom ages hereafter
Will be more willing to praise than they are to praise one another:
Some do I know, but I fear, as is meet, to recount or report them,
For, be whatever the name that is foremost, the next will run over,
Trampling and rolling in dust his excellent friend the precursor.
Peace be with all! but afar be ambition to follow the Roman,
Led by the German, uncomb'd, and jigging in dactyl and spondee,
Lumbering shapeless jackboots which nothing can polish or supple.
Much as old metres delight me, 'tis only where first they were nurtured,
In their own clime, their own speech: than pamper them here I would rather
Tie up my Pegasus tight to the scanty-fed rack of a sonnet.

* * * * *

[FROM HOUSEHOLD WORDS.]

A MIGHTIER HUNTER THAN NIMROD.

A great deal has been said about the prowess of Nimrod, in connection
with the chase, from the days of him of Babylon to those of the late
Mr. Apperley of Shropshire; but we question whether, among all the
sporting characters mentioned in ancient or modern story, there ever
was so mighty a hunter as the gentleman whose sporting calendar
now lies before us.[4] The annals of the chase, so far as we are
acquainted with them, supply no such instances of familiar intimacy
with lions, elephants, hippopotami, rhinoceroses, serpents,
crocodiles, and other furious animals, with which the human species
in general is not very forward in cultivating an acquaintance.

[Footnote 4: A Hunter's Life in South Africa. By R. Gordon Cumming,
Esq., of Altyre.]

Mr. C