then, either to flush or to bag sufficient game. But, somehow or other,
of late years there has been a sort of panic among the poets. The
gentler sort have either been scared by the improvisatore warblings of
Mr Wakley, or terrified into silence by undue and undeserved
apprehensions of the Knout. Seldom now are they heard to chirrup except
under cover of the leaves of a sheltering magazine; and although we do
occasionally detect a thin and ricketty octavo taking flight from the
counter of some publisher, it is of so meek and inoffensive a kind that
we should as soon think of making prize of a thrush in a bed of
strawberries. We are much afraid that the tendency of the present age
towards the facetious has contributed not a little to the dearth of
sonnets and the extermination of the elegiac stanza. So long as friend
Michael Angelo Titmarsh has the privilege of frequenting the house of
Mrs Perkins and other haunts of fashionable and literary celebrity,
Poseidon Hicks will relapse into gloomy silence, and Miss Bunion refrain
from chanting her Lays of the Shattered Heart-strings. It a hard thing
that a poet may not protrude his gentle sorrows for our commiseration,
mourn over his blighted hopes, or rejoice the bosom of some budding
virgin by celebrating her, in his Tennysonian measure, as the
light-tressed Ianthe or sleek-haired Claribel of his soul, without being
immediately greeted by a burst of impertinent guffaws, and either
wantonly parodied or profanely ridiculed to his face. So firm is our
belief in the humanising influence of poetry that we would rather, by a
thousand times, that all the reviews should perish, and all the
satirists be consigned to Orcus, than behold the total cessation of song
throughout the British Islands. And if we, upon any former occasion,
have spoken irreverently of the Nincompoops, we now beg leave to tender
to that injured body our heartfelt contrition for the same; and invite
them to join with us in a pastoral pilgrimage to Arcadia, where they
shall have the run of the meadows, with a fair allowance of pipes and
all things needful--where they may rouse a satyr from every bush,
scamper over the hills in pursuit of an Oread, or take a sly vizzy at a
water-nymph arranging her tresses in the limpid fountains of the
Alpheus. What say you, our masters and mistresses, to this proposal for
a summer ramble?

Hitherto we have spoken merely of the gentler section of the bards. But
there is another d