s and brown hair, which flows in
ringlets of curls over his shoulders. Horace is the son of a city
banker, by the second daughter of an English earl, a young gentleman of
considerable expectations, and very amusing qualifications. Horace is
a strange composition of all the good-natured whimsicalities of
human nature, happily blended together without any very conspicuous
counteracting foible. Facetious, lively, and poetical, the cream of
every thing that is agreeable, society cannot be dull if Horace lends
his presence. His imitations of Anacreon, and the soft bard of Erin,
have on many occasions puzzled the cognoscenti of Eton. Like Moore
too, he both composes and performs his own songs. The following little
specimen of his powers will record one of those pleasant impositions
with which he sometimes enlivens a winter's evening:

TO ELIZA.

Oh think not the smile and the glow of delight,
With youth's rosy hue, shall for ever be seen:

Frosty age will o'ercloud, with his mantle of night,
The brightest and fairest of nature's gay scene.

Or think while you trip, like some aerial sprite,
To pleasure's soft notes on the dew-spangled mead,

That the rose of thy cheek, or thine eyes' starry light,
Shall sink into earth, and thy spirit be freed.

Then round the gay circle we'll frolic awhile,
And the light of young love shall the fleet hour bless

While the pure rays of friendship our eve-tide beguile,
Above fortune's frowns and the chills of distress

~36~~
The most provoking punster and poet that ever turned the serious and
sentimental into broad humour. Every quaint remark affords a pun or an
epigram, and every serious sentence gives birth to some merry couplet.
Such is the facility with which he strings together puns and rhyme,
that in the course of half an hour he has been known to wager, and win
it--that he made a couplet and a pun on every one present, to the
number of fifty. Nothing annoys the exquisite _Sextile_ so much as
this tormenting talent of Horace; he is always shirking him, and yet
continually falling in his way. For some time, while Horace was in the
fourth form, these little _jeu-d'esprits_ were circulated privately, and
smuggled up in half suppressed laughs; but being now high on the fifth,
Horace is no longer in fear of _fagging_, and therefore gives free
license to his tongue in many a witty jest, which "sets the table in a
roar."