We knew and loved the late Peter Corcoran well-and had ourselves intended to have given his Remains to the world, but justice has been done him by another editor, who enjoyed and deserved the friendship of that poetical pugilist. We cannot too much applaud the delicacy with which he has discharged this melancholy duty to his chum. He has violated no private confidence he has kindled no animosities he has promulgated no pernicious doctrines. They who read the memoirs of Peter Corcoran to indulge a passion for scandal, will soon shut the volume in disappointmentthey who dip into his works from the love of vice, will, if they read attentively, carry away with them an abhorrence of its seductions and a pity for its miseries. The poet, the pugilist, and the philosopher, will find in this little volume, food for the reason, the imagination, and the faney.

Indeed, we do not scruple to say, that this prefatory memoir is one of the best pieces of biography that have appeared during this age. The lives of Chatterton, Burns, Dermody, Kirk White, and others, are vastly inferior in interest and instruction to that of Peter Corcoran. The case of Chatterton, "the Bristol boy, who perished in his pride," is anomalous, and there fore useless. There is little chance of any other young man coming to an untimely end by the forgery of old poems. Burns, too, had a destiny from which no moral can be well drawn, generally applicable to poetical ploughmen. He loved whisky-and his patrons made him an Exciseman. Poor Dermody, whom the Edinburgh Reviewer feelingly called, "Dermody the drunkard," died of hope, despair, poverty, passion, hunger, and thirst-a stranger in a foreign land-and no doubt, a moral might be drawn from

his destiny. Kirk White died of the mathematics. The D. J. O. of Peter Corcoran, gives a lesson to the age, which, we hope, the age will read and profit by-he perished by pugilism— not the practice, but the passion of the art. Curtis † and Corcoran are, each in his respective way, the martyrs of the ring.

Peter Corcoran was born in September 1794, at Shrewsbury," a town," says the editor," not very celebrated for men either of talent or genius, but proverbial for the pride and arrogance of its inhabitants, and the excellence of its cakes." His parents were Irish, but left Carlow soon after their marriage. The editor has neglected to assure the world of what we know to be a fact, that Mrs Corcoran was pregnant before she left Carlow-indeed farther advanced than the thoughtless reader might conjecture so that Peter was merely born in Shropshire. During his boyhood, he licked the best lads all round the Wrekin-and it will be some time before the familiar appellation of Young Corky will be forgotten by the Severn's side. At Oxford he made a considerable figure, having thrashed a proctor, and been pluckedan operation on which he ever afterwards felt extremely sore. One of the best battles, perhaps, he ever fought, was with a big blouzy bachelor of Brazenose, in Port-Meadow, who tauntingly had shook his sleeves at Peter, and complimented him on having shewn pluck in the schools. Peter, who was a first class man in his way, took the fight out of A. B. in the twinkling of a bed-post, and walked back to Corpus, robed in his antagonists bachelor's gown, to the great delight of that nation. Leaving Oxford without a degree, (after all, where is the use of one to an Irishman in London ?) young Corcoran

+ Killed in battle by left-handed Ned.

entered himself of Gray's Inn, and took lodgings in Vine Street, Picca dilly, to be near a pretty girl (his designs were honourable) with whom he had become acquainted during a run up from Oxford to Town. "It may be supposed," quoth the editor neatly, "that he looked more into her face than into the Lord Chancellors; and that he turned the curls on her forehead oftener than the leaves of Coke." He now fell into poetry, and flamed in the gorgeous pages of La Belle assemblée, or pined in the sober and pensive volumes of the Gentleman's. The Magazines felt the ardour or the melancholy of his hand, month after month!" The following is a specimen of the effusions of his muse at this period-and we conceive that there could be nothing particularly disagreeable in hearing it sung to a good air.

STANZAS.

Hark! Italy's music
Melts over the sea;
Falling light from some lattice,
Where cavaliers be:
And sweet lady voices
Steal over the deep,
To hush all around us
The billows to sleep.

Our gondola gently

Goes over the wave;
As though it were dreaming
To sounds that enslave:-
We listen we listen!

How blessed are we,
Who hear this dim music

O'er Italy's sea!

Unfortunately at this period the young lady whom Peter loved went down into Kent, on a visit to her maternal uncle, an immense Hop Merchant; and Peter, after ineffectual efforts to fan his constancy by love letters, "was driven, by the natural enthusiasm of his mind, to seek in other pursuits new pleasures, not that his love decreased, but from inaction it slept." It was a critical time with Corcoran. His evil genius met him one drizzly day in August 1817, (Tuesday 19th,) in a shape not at all to be suspected, namely, that of an old Oxford acquaintance, dressed in a blue surtout and white trowsers, and wiled him away into the Fives Court, to witness a sparring exhibition. It was for the benefit of Randal, and the nonpareil's first appeal to the patronage of

the public. This was the most important day in young Corcoran's life, and thenceforth he devoted all the exertions of his mind and body to the science of pugilism. He passed evening after evening at Belcher's house, Castle Tavern, (you see Tom, we have not forgotten you, compliments to Mrs Belcher), and can we praise him more, than to say that he was the friend of Egan? Would that he had confined himself to such harmless and amusing company! Would that nothing darker had overshadowed his destiny, than the clouds blown over him by the historian of the British Ring. But "thin partitions" do in London divide houses of very different kinds of entertainment, and Peter Corcoran too soon made a wreck, no, not of his honour, but assuredly of his health and happiness. Even in sparring with the gloves, it was but too visible to his friends, that he gave the return with diminished rapidity, that his guard was wavering, and that his confidence was gone. The day had been when he had not the worst of it, even with Eales, when he had stopped Scroggin's rush, and parried "the ravaging hand of Randal." But second-raters nobbed him now; and his wind was so treacherous, that after a couple of rounds, he was at the mercy even of a Johnny Raw! At this dark period, his poetical seems to have faded with his pugilistic pow"His muse abandoned all hopes of achieving any thing great or good, and it was with this feeling that he wrote the following sonnets."

ers.

It has been mentioned that Corcoran had left off writing to his absent mistress, fortunate perhaps had it been for him, had he never resumed it. So wholly was he devoted to pugilism, that he wrote to her a very injudicious letter, containing little else (the letter is now lying before us, and we before it) than an account of the "Mill between Belasco and the Brummagem youth." The young lady, as incensed as if she had received a crossbuttock, gave him a chattering hit on the deaf side of his head, to which he made the following return :

·

MY DEAR KATE,-I assure you I am not fibbing, when, I say, I regret that my last letter proved so severe a punisher to you. You have, however, returned upon me pretty smartly. You have quite hit me off my pugilistic legs,-doubled me and my letter up at a blow, and actually floored me. And though (as this may serve to show) you have not altogether taken the fight out of me,' yet you see I come very languidly up to the scratch; and this will be in all probability the last round in which I shall present myself before you in a milling attitude. You are too much for me. I am but a light weight, and you carry too much gravity. My rallyings are of no use. If I make a good hit, it does not tell upon you. You are too well guarded. I waste my wits and my wind to no purpose: if I try to plant a tickler upon your ribs that shall shake your sides, you laugh at me, instead of with me; and finally put in a writehander upon me by the post, that disables my jaw, and drops me. There is no standing up against such a rum customer as you are. So I shall in future keep myself out of the way of such punishment.

Alas, for poor Fancy!-If her flowers meet with so nipping a reception in the neighbourhood of her own Moulsey, she may as well, (like Lord Castlereagh's crocodile,) put her hands into her breeches pockets; or turn them to any thing else,

rather than double them into fists. She had better at once cut down her gloves into mittens, and put her fingers into rings, instead of going into them herself." Yours, &c. PETER CORCORAN.

"On the return of his young mistress to town, Corcoran for a while absented himself from the haunts of pugilists and of the Fancy-being in some sort influenced by her presence: but he was always unsettled and heedless, and he sat late, and forgot himself before her in the histories of his favourite subjects. Differences naturally arose between the lovers on his altered habits; but he had become hasty and intemperate, and she, from being disgusted at his follies and his faults, gradually alienated her heart from his first affection. The lady did not consider herself faithless, for Peter was not the same that she had loved previous to her Kentish visit. On one occasion he appeared before her in the day with two black eyes, and with other marks of the preceding night's skirmish on his way home. The lady from this moment forbade him be persuaded to relent, though he sued to her in that fond and penitent style, which bespoke in him an undecayed affection. Some lines appear in this selection which he wrote to her soon after this unfortunate event, thinking that she would listen to his humour, and forget his misconduct: but she returned the stanzas upon his hands, and from this identical copy the lines have been printed.

her

presence, nor could she ever afterwards

"His letters of expostulation to her were dictated by a steadier pen and a more sombre mind; but these met with the same fate. In one of his letters he says: "You suffer by the recollection of that idle quarrel, cannot imagine, my dearest Kate, what I and the still more idle verses which it occasioned. If you continue unforgiving, I have no one left to make life cheerful. My own good opinion is lost. My nights are tor

་

ture to me: but I seem now to have no inmight, perhaps, escape from folly, if any one ducement to wish them better or quieter. I would rejoice at it, or welcome me back to the world."" In another letter he writes, pair: "To-morrow I go to Randall's fight; as if in the provocation of sorrow and desbut I think if I were recalled by you, I could break my promise to my companions, and pass a day of happiness and forgiveness with you. Try me, my dear Kate!" ed to reclaim him; but it is much to be laIt is most probable that she never attempt

mented that an endeavour was not made

by her: for, from her influence alone, could

such a measure have been effected."

We cannot do better than give the close of this unfortunate young man's life, in the simple and pathetic language of his biographer.

"The health of Peter, which had been some time declining, now became rapidly altered

for the worse; and he fell into the most dangerous state, apparently without a struggle on his part to avoid it. He was gay, active, and spirited to the last, with the exception of his nightly visits of melancholy, and occasional fits of despondency by day. In reality, life had lost its importance to him. "In the last weeks of his existence, he employed himself in writing light pieces of poetry for his own amusement; thus living over again the pleasures of which, in health, he had so eagerly partaken. A few of these, and but a few, are now printed. The spirit of poor Corcoran was thus triumphant over pain, and thus did it remain till his departure. His father was with him at his death, and witnessed that heartrending sight, the termination of a consumption, that complaint which flatters even in its conclusion. Peter wished to see his mistress, but she declined the interview. "He was," as Dr Johnson says, "inextinguishably amorous, and she inexorably cruel." He died very recently without a struggle, just after writing a Sonnet to West Country Dick.

"It is impossible to contemplate the youth, the talents, the fate of this young man, and not lament that he should not have applied himself to some pursuit steadily, so as to have filled a worthy station in life. At one time he seems to have partly recovered himself from the trammels of sad society; but the fascination of pugilism and its professors was too strong in his eyes, and he sealed his ruin and his death by a devotion to its pleasures. A fight was to him a resistless attraction, and he has often declared that he never was so thrilled with enthusiasm, as when that moment arrived at which the men stripped against a fine sun, and advanced like trained bloodhorses, to start for the prize. Peter caught cold upon cold at these diversions; and certainly to an infatuated and unrestrained attention to such pursuits his death is attributable. Pugilism in itself is a manly and noble science; but it is apt to seduce its admirers into evil ways and corrupting society. "The person of Peter Corcoran was tall and slim. His features were of a pleasing expression, particularly when they were

substance. Corcoran was remarkably fond of puns, as his works will exemplify. He wrote with great rapidity, when he could bring himself to write at all; but he more often commenced than concluded works; and it was a common case for him to plan and open a new piece at night which was neglected or forgotten in the morning.

"He had few friends :-and it cannot be denied, in spite of his faults, that his mistress was harsh and relentless, beyond the run of women in general. Few ladies would have frowned so long, who appeared at one time to love so well. The woman that can retain her stern disregard through a long siege of letters and verses, is either singularly high-principled, or superlatively unfeeling. Peter, with all his heedlessness, was the only constant lover of the two, for he remembered her on his death-bed. lady still lives, and is married. When she reads this imperfect memoir of Corcoran, she will surely feel some contrition at having repulsed him to the last, instead of having lured him from the fatal and fascinating errors that generated his death.

The

"The works selected for publication are but a small portion of those left in MS. by Peter; if this little volume should be well received by the Public, the Editor may be induced to offer what Addison has happily called, "more last words of Mr Baxter."

Having thus discussed the life of Mr Corcoran, let us now direct the attention of our readers to the selection which the judicious Editor has made from his writings. The first poem is an American tragedy, entitled, King Tims the First, and is an addicritics, who are monthly bewailing tional proof of the absurdity of those the decay of dramatic genius in this country. What the deuce would the people be at? Have they not Baillie, Maturin, Shiel, Milman, Lamb, Coleridge, and Corcoran? The following are the Dramatis Persona of this fine play, which is, in truth, not only like Mrs Baillie's, and all other plays, a play upon the passions, but also a play upon words.

MEN.

KING TIMS (late a Butcher on Dowgate Hill).

ANTHONY TIMS (his Son, and Heir Apparent).

"His style of writing is not good; it is too broken, irresolute, and rugged,-and is too anxious in its search after smart expressions to be continuous or elevated in its

QUEEN TIMS.

WOMEN.

MRS JENKINSOP.
MISS JEMIMA JENKINSOP.

The Scene is laid in the Back Settlements of North America.-Time, half a day.