To a well-known Musical Critic, remarkable
for his ears sticking through his hair.*

! 0 -! of you we complain

For exposing those ears to the wind and the rain.
Thy face, a huge whitlow just come to a head,
Ill agrees with those ears so raw and so red.

A Musical Critic of old fell a-pouting

When he saw how his asinine honours were sprouting;
But he hid 'em quite snug, in a full frizz of hair,
And the Barber alone smoked his donkeys rare.

Thy judgment much worse, and thy perkers as ample,
O give heed to King Midas, and take his example.
Thus to publish your fate is as useless as wrong-
You but prove by your ears what we guess'd from
your tongue.
LABERIUS.

ΕΓΩΕΝΚΑΙΠΑΝ.

[The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoismus may, perhaps, be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of Fichte's idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature.]

The Categorical Imperative, or the Annunciation of the New Teutonic God, ETENKAIIIAN: a dithyrambic Ode, by Querkopf Von Klubstick, Grammarian, and Subrector in Gymnasio. ****

Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,

(Speak English, friend!) the God Imperativus, Here on this market-cross aloud I cry :

I, I, I! I itself I !

*Morning Post, January 4, 1798.

The form and the substance, the what and the why,
The when and the where, and the low and the high,
The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,
I, you, and he, and he, you and I,

All souls and all bodies are I itself I !

All I itself I !

(Fools! a truce with this starting!)
I! all my I!

All my

He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin !"
Thus cried the God with high imperial tone :
In robe of stiffest state, that scoff'd at beauty,
A pronoun-verb imperative he shone—
Then substantive and plural-singular grown,
He thus spake on :— "Behold in I alone
(For Ethics boast a syntax of their own)
Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!
I of the world's whole Lexicon the root !
Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight,
The genitive and ablative to boot :

The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right,
And in all cases the case absolute!
Self-construed, I all other moods decline:
Imperative, from nothing we derive us ;
Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
Unconstrued antecedence I assign

To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus! *

The Briage Street Committee. An Impromptu.

Jack Stripe

Eats tripe,

It is therefore credible

That tripe is edible.

* Biographia Literaria, Lond. 1817, vol. i. pp. 148, 149 note.

And therefore perforce
It follows of course
That the Devil will gripe
All who do not eat tripe.

And as Nick is too slow
To fetch 'em below,
And Gifford the attorney
Won't quicken the journey;
The Bridge-Street Committee
That colleague without pity
To imprison and hang
Carlile and his gang,

Is the pride of the city :

And 'tis association

That alone saves the nation

From death and damnation.*

To Nature.

It may indeed be phantasy when I
Essay to draw from all created things

Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie
Lessons of love and earnest piety.

So let it be; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this belief, [to me] it brings
Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.
So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to thee,

* Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S.T. Coleridge, Lond. Moxon, 1836, vol. i. pp. 90, 91.

Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.*

What boots to tell how o'er his

grave

She wept that would have died to save ;
Little they know the heart who deem
Her sorrow but an infant's dream
Of transient love begotten;
A passing gale that as it blows

Just shakes the ripe drop from the rose-
That dies, and is forgotten.

Oh woman! nurse of hopes and fears,
All lovely in thy spring of years,

Thy soul in blameless mirth possessing;
Most lovely in affliction's tears,

More lovely still those tears suppressing.†

So Mr. Baker heart did pluck—

And did a-courting go !

And Mr. Baker is a buck;

For why? he needs the doe.‡

Lines in a German Student's Album.

[The Germans, of all mortals the most imaginative, take extraordinary delight in their albums; and Coleridge being a noticeable Englander, and a poet withal, was not unfrequently requested to favour with a scrap of verse persons who had no very particular claims

* Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. C., vol. i. P. 144.

† Ib., vol. ii. p. 75.

Ib., vol. ii. p. 21.

upon his muse. As a specimen of the playful scintillations of this gifted man upon such occasions, I subjoin the following quatrain, which he wrote when about to leave the University in the Stammbuch of a Göttingen student who had the same course of lectures (Collegium) with him *]:

“We both attended the same College,

Where sheets of paper we did blur many,
And now we're going to sport our knowledge,
In England I, and you in Germany.”

EPIGRAM ON KEPLER.

From the German.

No mortal spirit yet had clomb so high
As Kepler-yet his Country saw him die
For very want! the Minds alone he fed,
And so the Bodies left him without bread.†

Whene'er the mist that stands 'twixt God and thee
Defecates to a pure transparency

That intercepts no light and adds no stain,-
There Reason is, and then begins her reign !i‡

DISTICH.

From the Greek.§

Jack finding gold left a rope on the ground;
Bill missing his gold used the rope, which he found.

*Carlyon's Early Years and Late Recollections.

+ The Friend, p. 231.

On the Constitution of the Church and State, by S. T. Coleridge. Lond. 1830, p. 227.

§ Omniana, 1812, vol. ii. p. 123.