let us remember that
Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus have all described spirited rallies with
admiration and good taste. From his dissipation in cider-cellars and
coal-holes, this rival of Tom and Jerry wrote a sonnet that applies well
enough to Reynolds's own career:

"Were this a feather from an eagle's wing,
And thou, my tablet white! a marble tile
Taken from ancient Jove's majestic pile--
And might I dip my feather in some spring,
Adown Mount Ida threadlike wandering:--
And were my thoughts brought from some starry isle
In Heaven's blue sea--I then might with a smile
Write down a hymn to fame, and proudly sing!

"But I am mortal: and I cannot write
Aught that may foil the fatal wing of Time.
Silent, I look at Fame: I cannot climb
To where her Temple is--Not mine the might:--
I have some glimmering of what is sublime--
But, ah! it is a most inconstant light."

Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholy mood.

"About this time he (Peter) wrote a slang description of a fight he had
witnessed to a lady." Unlucky Peter! "Was ever woman in this manner
wooed?" The lady "glanced her eye over page after page in hopes of
meeting with something that was intelligible," and no wonder she did not
care for a long letter "devoted to the subject of a mill between Belasco
and the Brummagem youth." Peter was so ill-advised as to appear before
her with glorious scars, "two black eyes" in fact, and she "was
inexorably cruel." Peter did not survive her disdain. "The lady still
lives, and is married"! It is ever thus!

Peter's published works contain an American tragedy. Peter says he got
it from a friend, who was sending him an American copy of "Guy Mannering"
"to present to a young lady who, strange to say, read books and wore
pockets," virtues unusual in the sex. One of the songs (on the delights
of bull-baiting) contains the most vigorous lines I have ever met, but
they are _too_ vigorous for our lax age. The tragedy ends most
tragically, and the moral comes in "better late," says the author, "than
never." The other poems are all very lively, and very much out of date.
Poor Peter!

Reynolds was married by 1818, and it is impossible to guess whether the
poems of Peter Corcoran did or did not contain allusions to his own more
lucky love affair. "Upon my soul," writes Keats, "I have been getting
more and more close to you every day, ever since I