es half-effaced
By cant of Fashion and of Taste,--
Not in the circles of the Great,
Faint-blooded and exanimate,--
Lay the true field of Jest and Whim,
Which we to-day reap after him.
No:--he stepped lower down and took
The piebald PEOPLE for his Book!

Ah, what a wealth of Life there is
In that large-laughing page of his!
What store and stock of Common-Sense,
Wit, Wisdom, Books, Experience!
How his keen Satire flashes through,
And cuts a sophistry in two!
How his ironic lightning plays
Around a rogue and all his ways!
Ah, how he knots his lash to see
That ancient cloak, Hypocrisy!

Whose are the characters that give
Such round reality?--that live
With such full pulse? Fair SOPHY yet
Sings _Bobbing Joan_ at the spinet;
We see AMELIA cooking still
That supper for the recreant WILL;
We hear Squire WESTERN'S headlong tones
Bawling "Wut ha?--wut ha?" to JONES.
Are they not present now to us,--
The Parson with his _AEschylus_?
SLIPSLOP the frail, and NORTHERTON,
PARTRIDGE, and BATH, and HARRISON?--
Are they not breathing, moving,--all
The motley, merry carnival
That FIELDING kept, in days agone?

He was the first who dared to draw
Mankind the mixture that he saw;
Not wholly good nor ill, but both,
With fine intricacies of growth.
He pulled the wraps of flesh apart,
And showed the working human heart;
He scorned to drape the truthful nude
With smooth, decorous platitude!

He was too frank, may be; and dared
Too boldly. Those whose faults he bared,
Writhed in the ruthless grasp that brought
Into the light their secret thought.
Therefore the TARTUFFE-throng who say
"_Couvrez ce sein_," and look that way,--
Therefore the Priests of Sentiment
Rose on him with their garments rent.
Therefore the gadfly swarm whose sting
Plies ever round some generous thing,
Buzzed of old bills and tavern-scores,
Old "might-have-beens" and "heretofores";--
Then, from that garbled record-list,
Made him his own Apologist.

And was he? Nay,--let who has known
Nor Youth nor Error, cast the stone!
If to have sense of Joy and Pain
Too keen,--to rise, to fall again,
To live too much,--be sin, why then,
This was no pattern among men.
But those who turn that later page,
The Journal of