ssibly, a brief specimen or two of this may please: take the
livelier first,--on French cookery: if trivial, the lines are genuine: I
must not doctor anything up even by a word.

"Now Muse, you must versify your very best,
To sing how they ransack the East and the West,
To tell how they plunder the North and the South
For food for the stomach and zest for the mouth!
Such savoury stews, and such odorous dishes,
Such soups, and (at Calais) such capital fishes!
With sauces so strange they disguise the lean meat
That you seldom, or never, know what you're to eat;
Such fricandeaux, fricassees epicurean,
Such vins-ordinaires, and such banquets Circean,--
And the nice little nothings which very soon vanish
Before you are able your plate to replenish,--
Such exquisite eatables! and for your drink
Not porter or ale, but--what do you think?
'Tis Burgundy, Bourdeaux, real red rosy wine,
Which you quaff at a draught, neat nectar, divine!
Thus they pamper the taste with everything good
And of an old shoe can make savoury food,
But the worst of it is that when you have done
You are nearly as famish'd as when you begun!"

For a more serious morsel, take the closing lines on Rouen:--

"Yes, proud Cathedral, ages pass'd away
While generations lived their little day,--
France has been deluged with her patriots' blood
By traitors to their country and their God,--
The face of Europe has been changed, but thou
Hast stood sublime in changelessness till now,
Exulting in thy glories of carved stone,
A living monument of ages gone!--
Yet--time hath touch'd thee too; thy prime is o'er,--
A few short years, and thou must be no more;
Ev'n thou must bend beneath the common fate,
But in thy very ruins wilt be great!"

More than enough of this brief memory of "Sixty Years Since," which has
no other extant record, and is only given as a sample of the rest,
equally juvenile. Three years however before, this, my earliest piece
printed, I find among my papers a very faded copy of my first MS. in
verse, being part of an attempted prize poem at Charterhouse on
Carthage, written at the age of thirteen in 1823; for auld langsyne's
sake I rescue its conclusion thus curtly from oblivion,--though no doubt
archaeologically faulty:--

"Where sculptured temples once appeared to sight,
Now dismal ruins meet the moon's