(127) I may remark, in passing, that the author of the Greek version of this charming ode of Catullus, has neglected a more striking and anacreontic beauty in those verses, "Ut flos in septis," &c., which is the repetition of the line, "Multi illum pueri, multæ optavère puellæ," with the slight alteration of nulli and nullæ. Catullus himself, however, has been equally injudicious in his version of the famous ode of Sappho; having translated yeλwras ipɛpoɛr, but omitted all notice of the accompanying charm, ddv pwvovaas. Horace has caught the spirit of it more faithfully:

Dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo,
Dulce loquentem.

(128) This fragment is preserved in the third book of Strabo.

(129) He here alludes to Arganthonius, who lived, according to Lucian, a hundred and fifty years; and reigned, according to Herodotus, eighty. See Barnes.

(130) Longepierre, to give an idea of the luxurious estimation in which garlands were held by the ancients, relates an anecdote of a courtesan, who, in order to gratify three lovers, without leaving cause for jealousy with any of them, gave a kiss to one, let the other drink after her, and put a garland on the brow of the third; so that each was satisfied with his favor, and flattered himself with the preference.

This circumstance resembles very much the subject of one of the tensons of Savari de Mauléon, a troubadour. See L'Histoire Littéraire des Troubadours. The recital is a curious picture of the puerile gallantries of chivalry.

(131) This fragment, which is extant in Athenæus, (Barnes, 101,) is supposed, on the authority of Chamæleon, to have been addressed to Sappho. We have also a stanza attributed to her, which some romancers have supposed to be her answer to Anacreon. "Mais par malheur, (as Bayle says,) Sappho vint au monde environ cent ou six vingt ans avant Anacréon.” -Nouvelles de la Rep des Lett. tom. ii. de Novembre, 1684. The following is her fragment, the compliment of which is finely imagined; she supposes that the Muse has dictated the verses of Anacreon:

(134) Thus Simonides, speaking of our poet:

Nor yet are all his numbers mute,
Though dark within the tomb he lies;
But living still, his amorous lute
With sleepless animation sighs!

This is the famous Simonides, whom Plato styled "divine," though Le Fevre, in his Poëtes Grecs, supposes that the epigrams under his name are all falsely imputed. The most considerable of his remains is a satirical poem upon women, preserved by Stobæus.

We may judge from the lines I have just quoted, and the import of the epigram before us, that the works of Anacreon were perfect in the times of Simonides and Antipater. Obsopous, the commentator here, appears to exult in their do

struction, and telling us they were burned by the bishops and patriarchs, he adds, "nec sane id necquicquam fecerunt," attributing to this outrage an effect which it could not possibly have produced.

(135) The spirit of Anacreon is supposed to utter these verses from the tomb,-somewhat “mutatus ab illo," at least in simplicity of expression.

(136) We may guess from the words ex Bißwv εuwv, that Anacreon was not merely a writer of billets-doux, as some French critics have called him. Among these Mr. Le Fevre, with all his professed admiration, has given our poet a character by no means of an elevated cast:

Aussi c'est pour cela que la postérité

L'a toujours justement d'age en age chanté
Comme un franc goguenard, ami de goinfrerie,
Ami de billets-doux et de badinerie.

See the verses prefixed to his Postes Grecs. This is unlike the language of Theocritus, to whom Anacreon is indebted for the following simple eulogium :

UPON THE STATUE OF ANACREON.

Stranger! who near this statue chance to roam,
Let it awhile your studious eyes engage;
That you may say, returning to your home,

"I've seen the image of the Teian sage,

"Best of the bards who deek the Muse's page." Then, if you add, "That striplings loved him well," You tell them all he was, and aptly tell.

I have endeavored to do justice to the simplicity of this inscription by rendering it as literally, I believe, as a verse translation will allow.

(137) Thus Simonides, in another of his epitaphs on our poet :

Let vines, in clust'ring beauty wreathed,
Drop all their treasures on his head,

28

Whose lips a dew of sweetness breathed, Richer than vine hath ever shed!

(138) In another of these poems, the "nightly-speaking lyre" of the bard is represented as not yet silent even after his death:

To beauty's smile and wine's delight,
To joys he loved on earth so well,
Still shall his spirit, all the night,
Attune the wild, aerial shell!

(139) We regret that such praise should be lavished so preposterously, and feel that the poet's mistress Eurypyle would have deserved it better. Her name has been told us by Meleager, as already quoted, and in another epigram by Antipater:

Long may the nymph around thee play,
Eurypyle, thy soul's desire,
Basking her beauties in the ray

That lights thine eye's dissolving fire!

Sing of her smile's bewitching power,

Her every grace that warms and blesses;

Sing of her brow's luxuriant flower,

The beaming glory of her tresses.

(140) This couplet is not otherwise warranted by the ori ginal, than as it dilates the thought which Antipater has fig. uratively expressed :-

Teos gave to Greece her treasure,
Sage Anacreon, sage in loving;
Fondly weaving lays of pleasure
For the maids who blush'd approving.

When in nightly banquets sporting,
Where's the guest could ever fly him?
When with love's seduction courting,

Where's the nymph could e'er deny him?

WE can scarcely regard Moore in the light of a satirist, if we apply that term to Juvenal, Horace, and Aristophanes of ancient times, and Dryden, Butler, and Pope of modern days.

There is a peculiarity in Moore's satirical writings which render him unlike any of those who have sported with the vices and failings of their contemporaries. It is difficult to define what the precise distinctive difference is, but it exists, nevertheless possibly it may consist in a combination of minor features, which so entirely change the aspect, as to render it a totally different being.

The chief ingredient is a playful wit, which, while sufficiently keen to make itself felt, is too polished to be cruel-Moore uses the lancet, and not the tomahawk, and yet he draws blood very freely for all that.

Another remarkable feature in his satire is the almost total absence of invective, or vituperation: his happiest and consequently most fatal assaults are achieved by his finished sarcasms, which are too politely done to be considered slaughter; indeed they may rather be called playful assassinations, than deliberate murders; in addition to these graceful executions, there is frequently an allegory or fable highly characteristic of the victimized delinquent.

We might instance among hundreds the verses commencing,

"Sir Hudson Lowe, Sir Hudson Low,

By name, but more by nature so!"

Here the fable and the sarcasm are so exquisitely blended, as to render this poem equal in polish to any Horatian ode extant.

Equal to this in finish, but superior in malice prepense, are the verses to Leigh Hunt, entitled "The Living Dog and Dead Lion." The writer of this five or six years since heard Leigh Hunt himself read these lines, and can testify to the equanimity and admiration he displayed: among other hits, the victim particularly praised

"Though he roared pretty well-this the puppy allows-
It was all, he says, borrow'd-all second-hand roar;
And he vastly prefers his own little bow-wows,
To the loftiest war-note the Lion could pour!

*

He lifts up his leg, at the noble bard's carcass, And does all a dog, so diminutive, can."

Our readers will no doubt recollect that this satire was occasioned by Hunt's book, called "Byron and some of his contemporaries."

Another of Moore's most felicitous satires are his lines" How to Write by Proxy." These verses were provoked by Lord Londonderry's book on the Peninsula Campaigns, which was entirely rewritten by Mr. Gleig, of Chelsea Hospital, and author of the "Subaltern." Even Londonderry himself must have smiled over the poet's badinage, as he read

"The Subaltern comes-sees his General seated, In all the self-glory of authorship swelling;"There look,' saith his lordship, my work is completed, 'It wants nothing now, but the grammar and spelling.'

But, lo! a fresh puzzlement starts up to view-
New toil for the Sub,-for the lord new expense:
Tis discover'd that mending the grammar won't do,
As the Subaltern also must find him in sense."

joke, ecce signum :—

"Long, in your golden shade reclined, Like him of fair Armida's bowers, May Wellington some wood-nymph find, To cheer his dozenth lustrum's hours.

Oh long may Woods and Forests be,
Preserved in all their teeming graces,
To shelter Tory bards, like me,

Who take delight in Sylvan Places."

It may be perhaps necessary to remind the reader that there is a department of the British governinent called "Woods and Forests," which has the control of public buildings, land revenues, &c.

It is seldom that Moore allows his bitterness to overpower his badinage: this however now and then happens, as in his "Incantation," in imitation of the witch scene in " Macbeth."

In this celebrated parody he thus boldly stigmatized the duke of Cumberland. The death of the duke's valet, Sellis, will no doubt be ever shrouded in obscurity, without his royal highness, like Webster, makes a death-bed confession; the facts of the case are briefly these:-The household were alarmed in the middle of the night by the duke rushing out of his bedroom wounded and bleeding upon their going to his apartment they

found Sellis dead on the floor:-the duke's account was, that he was awakened by some one attempting to murder him; starting up, the duke

and that he had detected the duke intriguing with her. Popular opinion ran so strongly against the royal duke, as to almost banish him from society. Moore thus- alludes to it:

"Squeeze o'er all that Orange juice,

Which Cumberland keeps corked for use:
Which, to work the better spell, is

Coloured deep with blood of Sellis!"

But the Prince Regent was one of those whom our poet most delighted to satirize, and here his blows told, since every allusion was understood by the public.

When the bill for restricting the royal prerogative was being discussed, he published his celebrated parody on the Regent's letter to the duke of York. He thus alludes to the madness of the king:

"A straight waistcoat on him-and restrictions on me,
A more limited monarchy scarce well can be!"

George the Fourth has certainly as fair a chance of immortality as any sovereign that ever lived, since Byron and Moore, the two wittiest and most popular poets of his times have made him the subject of their unsparing sarcasms. Moore's epistles, alluding to the Prince Regent being stunned in a fight, lying insensible, he says

In another of

"But every means failed to bring him to life, Till Liverpool whispered, By heavens! here's your wife!"

THE following trifles, having enjoyed, in their circulation through the newspapers, all the celebrity and length of life to which they were entitled, would have been suffered to pass quietly into oblivion without pretending to any further distinction, had they not already been published, in a collective form, both in London and Paris,

and, in each case, been mixed up with a number of other productions, to which, whatever may be their merit, the author of the following pages has no claim. A natural desire to separate his own property, worthless as it is, from that of others, is, he begs to say, the chief motive of the publication of T. M. this volume.