But my hearers cry out: What a deuce dost thou ail ?
Cut off thy reflections, and give us thy tale.'

Derry down, &c.
'Twas there, then, in civil respect to harsh laws,'
And for want of false witness to back a bad cause,
A Norman, though late, was obliged to appear ;
And who to assist, but a grave Cordelier ?

Derry down, &c.
The 'squire, whose good grace was to open the scene,
Seemed not in great haste that the show should begin ;
Now fitted the halter, now traversed the cart;
And often took leave, but was loath to depart.

Derry down, &c.
“What frightens you thus, my good son ?' says the priest;
• You murdered, are sorry, and have been confessed.'

O father! my sorrow will scarce save my bacon ;
For 'twas not that I murdered, but that I was taken.'

Derry down, &c.

Pooh, prithee ne'er trouble thy head with such fancies ;
Rely on the aid you shall have from St. Francis ;
If the money you promised be brought to the chest,
You have only to die; let the church do the rest.'

Derry down, &c.
'And what will folks say, if they see you afraid ? .
It reflects upon me, as I knew not my trade.
Courage, friend, for to-day is your period of sorrow;
And things will go better, believe me, to-morrow.'

Derry down, &c.
"To-morrow ! our hero replied in a fright;.
• He that's hanged before noon, ought to think of to-night.'
• Tell your beads,' quoth the priest, and be fairly trussed up,
For you surely to-night shall in paradise.sup.'

Derry down, &c.
'Alas ! quoth the 'squire, “howe'er sumptuous the treat,
Parbleu! I shall have little stomach to eat ;
I should therefore esteem it great favour and grace,
Would you you be so kind as to go in my place.'

Derry down, &c.
“That I would,' quoth the father, and thank you to boot;
But our actions, you know, with our duty must suit;
The feast I proposed to you, I cannot taste,
For this night by our order, is marked for a fast.'

Derry down, &c.
Then turning about to the hangman, he said :
Despatch me, I prithee, this troublesome blade;
For thy cord and my cord both equally tie,
And we live by the gold for which other men die.'

Derry down, &c.
Ode to a Lady: She refusing to Continue a Dispute with me, and

leaving me in the argument. Spare, generous victor, spare the slave, In the dispute, whateer I said, Who did unequal war pursue;

My heart was by my tongue belied : That more than triumphs he might have And in my looks you might have read In being overcome by you!

How much I argued on your side.

You, far from danger as from fear,

Might have sustained an open fight;
For seldom your opinions err,
Your eyes are always in the right.

But she, howe'er of victory sure,

Contemns the wreath so long delayed ; And, armed with more immediate power,

Calls cruel silence to her aid.

Why, fair one, would you not rely

On reason's force with beauty's joined ? Could I their prevalence deny,

I must at once be deaf and blind.

Deeper to wound, she shuns the fight :

She drops her arms, to gain the field : Secures her conquest by her flight;

And triumphs when she seems to yield.

Alas! not hoping to subdue,

So when the Parthian turned his steed, I only to the fight aspired;

And from the hostile camp withdrew, To keep the beauteous foe in view, With cruel skill, the backward reed Was all the glory I desired.

He sent, and as he fled he slew.
Theory of the Mind-From 'Alma.'
I say, whatever you maintain

The added movements which declare Of Alma (1) in the heart or brain,

How full the moon, how old the year, The plainest man alive may tell ye

Derive their secondary power Her seat of empire is the belly.

From that which simply points the hour; From hence she sends out those supplies For though these gimcracks were awayWhich make us either stout or wise ; Quare (2) would not swear, but Quare Your stomach makes the fabric roll

would say Just as the bias rules the bowl.

However more reduced and plain, The great Achilles might employ

The watch would still a watch remain : The strength designed to ruin Troy; But if the horal orbit ceases, He dined on lion's marrow, spread

The whole stands still or breaks to pieces, On toasts of ammunition bread;

Is now no longer what it was, But, by his mother sent away

And you may e'en go sell the case. Amongst the Thracian girls to play, So, if unprejudiced you scan Effeminate he sat and quiet,

The goings of this clockwork, man, Strange product of a cheese-cake diet! You find a hundred movements made Observe the various operations

By fine devices in his head;
Of food and drink in several nations. But 'tis the stomach's solid stroke
Was ever Tartar fierce or cruel

That tells his being what's o'clock.
Upon the strength of water-gruel ?

If you take off this rhetoric trigger, But who shall stand his rage or force He talks no more in trope and figure; If first he rides, then eats his horse ? Or clog his mathematic wheel, Salads, and eggs, and lighter fare,

His buildings fall, his ship stands still: Tune the Italian spark's guitar;

Or, lastly, break his politic weight, And, if I take Dan Congreve right,

His voice no longer rules the state ? Pudding and beef make Britons fight. Yet, if these finer whims are gone, Tokay and coffee cause this work

Your clock, though plain, will still go on; Between the German and the Turk: But, spoil the organ of digestion. And both, as they provisions want,

And you entirely change the question Chicane, avoid, retire, and faint.

Alma's affairs no power can mend;

The jest, alas! is at an end; As, in a watch's fine machine,

Soon ceases all the worldly bustle, Though many artful Springs are seen; And you consign the corpse to Russell. (3)

REV. JAMES BRAMSTON. Two satirical poems by the Rev. JAMES BRAMSTON (circa 16941744), included in Dodsley's Collection,' were much admired in their day." These are: 'The Art of Politics; in imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry, 1729 ; and “The Man of Taste; occasioned by Pope's Epistle on that Subject,' 1731. Bramston also wrote an imitation of Philips's “ Splendid Shilling,' entitled “The Crooked Sixpence. In

2 A noted watchmaker of the day.

1707, Bramston was admitted at Westminster School; in 1713, he was elected to a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1725 he became vicar of Harting, in Sussex. His two principal poems are good imitations of the style of Young's and Pope's satires. The following is the conclusion of his' Art of Politics :

Parliamenteering is a sort of itch,
That will too oft unwary knights bewitch.
Two good estates Sir Harry Clodpole spent;
Sate thrice, but spoke not once, in Parliament.
Two good estates are gone-who'll take his word?
Oh, should his uncle die, he'll spend a third ;
He'd buy a house his happiness to crown,
Within a mile of some good borough-town;
Tag-rag and bobtail to Sir Harry's run,
Men that have votes, and women that have none;
Sons, daughters, grandsons, with his Honour dine;
He keeps a public-house without a sign.
Cobblers and smiths extol th’ ensuing choice,
And drunken tailors boast their right of voice.
Dearly the free-born neighborhood is bought,
They never leave him while he's worth a groat
So leeches stick, nor quit the bleeding wound,

Till off they drop with skinfuls to the ground.
In The Man of Taste' he thus ironically expatiates :

Swift's whims and jokes for my resentment call,
For he displeases me that pleases all.
Verse without rhyme I never could endure,
Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure.
To him as nature, when he ceased to see,
Milton's an universal blank to me.
Confirmed and settled by the nation's voice,
Rhyme is the poet's pride and people's choi
Always upheld by national support,
Of market, university, and court :
Thomson, write blank; but know that for that reason
These lines shall live when thine are out of season.
Rhyme binds and beautifies the poet's lays,
As London ladies owe their shape to stays.

JONATHAN SWIFT. JONATHAN SWIFT, one of the most remarkable men of the age, was born in Dublin, November 30, 1667. He was of English paren tagea fact which he never forgot, conceiving that there was a great distinction (as he wrote to Pope) between the English gentry of Ireland and the savage old Irish. His grandfather was vicar of Goodrich, in Herefordshire, who lost his fortune through his zeal and activity for Charles I. during the Civil war, Three of the vicar's sons settled in Ireland ; and Jonathan Swift, father of the celebrated author, was bred to the law in Dublin He was steward to the society of the King's Inns, but died in great poverty before the birth of his distinguished son. Swift was supported by his uncle; and the circumstances of want and dependence with which he was early familiar, seem to have sunk deep inso his haughty soul. Born a posthumous

child,' says Sir Walter Scott,' and bred up an object of charity, he early adopted the custom of observing his birthday as a term, not of joy, but of sorrow, and of reading, when it annually recurred, the striking passage of Scripture in which Job laments and execrates the day upon which it was said in his father's house “ that a man-child was born."' Swift was sent to Trinity College, Dublin, which he left in his twenty-first year-having only received his degree by special favour-and was received into the house of Sir William Temple, a distant relation of his mother. Here Swift met King William, and indulged hopes of preferment, which were never realised. In 1692, he repaired to Oxford, for the purpose of taking his degree of M.A.; and shortly after obtaining this distinction, he resolved to quit the establishment of Temple, and take orders in the Irish Church. He procured the prebend of Kilroot, in the diocese of Connor, but was soon disgusted with the life of an obscure country clergyman with an income of £100 a year. He returned to Moor Park, the house of Sir William Temple, and threw up his living at Kilroot. Temple died in 1699, and the poet was glad to accompany Lord Berkeley to Ireland in the capacity of chaplain. From this nobleman he obtained the rectory of Aghar, and the vicarages of Laracor and Rathyeggan; to which was afterwards added the prebend of Dunlavin, making his income only about £200 per annum. At Moor Park, Swift had (as stated in our notice of Temple) contracted an intimacy with Miss Esther Johnson, nominally the daughter of Sir William Temple's housekeeper ; but her face, her position in the family, and Sir William's treatment of her, seemed to some to proclaim the fact that she was Temple's natural child. He left her £1000. She went, with a female friend, to reside in Ireland, to be near Swift, her early instructor, but they never were alone together.

In 1701, Swift became a political writer on the side of the Whigs, and on his visits to England, he associated with Addison, Steele, and Halifax. In 1704 was published his. Tale of a Tub,' the wildest and wittiest of all polemical or controversial works. In 1710, conceiving that he was neglected by the ministry, he quarreled with the Whigs, and united with Harley and the Tory administration. He was received with open arms. 'I stand with the new people,' he writes to Stella, ‘ten times better than ever I did with the old, and forty times more caressed.' He carried with him shining weapons for party · warfare-irresistible and unscrupulous satire, steady hate, and a dauntless spirit. From his new allies, he received, in 1713, the deanery of St. Patrick's. During his residence in England, he had engaged the affections of another young lady, Esther Vanhomrigh, who, under the name of Vanessa, rivalled Stella in poetical celebrity, and in personal misfortune. After the death of her father, this young lady and her sister retired to Ireland, where their father had left a small property near Dublin. Human nature has, perhaps, never before or since presented the spectacle of a man of such transcendent

powers as Swift involved in such a pitiable labyrinth of the affections. His pride or ambition led him to postpone indefinitely his marriage with Stella, to whom he was early attached. Though, he said, he * loved her better than his life a thousand millions of times,' he kept her hanging on in a state of hope deferred, injurious alike to her peace and reputation. Did he fear the scorn and laughter of the world, if he should marry the obscure daughter of Sir William Temple's housekeeper ? He dared not afterwards, with manly sincerity, declare his situation to Vanessa, when this second victim avowed her passion. He was flattered that a girl of eighteen, of beauty and accomplishments, sighed for a gown of forty-four,' and he did not stop to weigh the consequences. The removal of Vanessa to Ireland, as Stella had gone before, to be near the presence of Swift-her irrepressible passion, which no coldness or neglect could extinguishher life of deep seclusion, only checkered by the occasional visits of Swift, each of which she commemorated by planting with her own hand a laurel in the garden where they met-her agonising remonstrances, when all her devotion and her offerings had failed, are touching beyond expression.

The reason I write to you,' she says, 'is because I cannot tell it to you, should I see you. For when I begin to complain, then you are angry; and there is something in your looks so awful, that it strikes me dumb. Oh! that you may have but so much regard for me left, that this complaint may touch your soul with pity. - I say as little as ever I can. Did you but know what I thought, I am sure it would move you to forgive me, and believe that I cannot help telling you this and live.'

To a being thus agitated and engrossed with the strongest passion, how poor, how cruel, must have seemed the return of Swift!

Cadenus, common forms apart,
In every scene had kept his heart:
Had sighed and languished, vowed and writ,
For pastime, or to shew his wit;
But books, and time, and state affairs,
Had spoiled his fashionable airs;
He now could praise, esteem, approve,
But understood not what was love:
His conduct might have made him styled
A father, and the nymph his child.
That innocent delight he took
To see the virgin mind her book,
Was but the master's secret joy

In school to hear the finest boy. The tragedy continued to deepen as it approached the close. Eight years had Vanessa nursed in solitude the hopeless attachment. At length she wrote to Stella, to ascertain the pature of the connection between her and Swift; the latter obtained the fatal letter, and rode instantly to Marley Abbey, the residence of the unhappy Vanessa. "As he entered the apartment,' to adopt the picturesque language of Scott in recording the scene, “the sternness of his countenance,