wind out of Shelley's satiric sails and fluttered the
dove-cotes of the Lakeists. He was as smart as he could be, too clever
to live, in fact, too light a weight for a grave age. In _The Fancy_,
which Keats seems to refer to in a letter dated January 13th, 1820,
Reynolds appears to have been inspired by Tom Moore's _Tom Crib_, but
if so, he vastly improves on that rather vulgar original. He takes as
his motto, with adroit impertinence, some lines of Wordsworth, and
persuades us

_nor need we blame the licensed joys,
Though false to Nature's quiet equipoise:
Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive_.

We can fancy the countenance of the Cumbrian sage at seeing his words
thus nimbly adapted to be an apology for prize-fighting.

The poems are feigned to be the remains of one Peter Corcoran,
student at law. A simple and pathetic memoir--which deserved to be as
successful as that most felicitous of all such hoaxes, the life of
the supposed Italian poet, Lorenzo Stecchetti--introduces us to the
unfortunate young Irishman, who was innocently engaged to a charming
lady, when, on a certain August afternoon, he strayed by chance into
the Fives Court, witnessed a "sparring-exhibition" by two celebrated
pugilists, and was thenceforth a lost character. From that moment
nothing interested him except a favourite hit or a scientific
parry, and his only topic of conversation became the noble art of
self-defence. To his disgusted lady-love he took to writing eulogies
of the Chicken and the Nonpareil. On one occasion he appeared before
her with two black eyes, for he could not resist the temptation of
taking part in the boxing, and "it is known that he has parried the
difficult and ravaging hand of Randall himself." The attachment of the
young lady had long been declining, and she took this opportunity of
forbidding him her presence for the future. He felt this abandonment
bitterly, but could not surrender the all-absorbing passion which was
destroying him. He fell into a decline, and at last died "without a
struggle, just after writing a sonnet to _West-Country Dick_."

The poems so ingeniously introduced consist of a kind of sporting
opera called _King Tims the First_, which is the tragedy of an
emigrant butcher; an epic fragment in _ottava rima_, called _The
Fields of Tothill_, in which the author rambles on in the Byronic
manner, and ceases, fatigued with his task, before he has begun to get
his story under weigh; an