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critiques of an intensely sui generis description in the pages of the Critic and the dissenting magazines. We had for some time anticipated that this magnus Apollodorus would be sooner or later taken notice of, in no complimentary way, by the author of "Firmilian"-so sedulous appears to be his "bilious attacks," acute as well as chronic, on Professor Aytoun-their bitterness savouring of that personal ill-will which makes one suspect that Apollodorus may have been a rejected contributor to Maga, or in some such experience have contracted the plethora of spleen he takes little pains to subdue or to disguise. To give one example out of many speaking of Aytoun's Lays of the Cavaliers, Mr. George Gilfillan says, they "are but Scott's cast-off clothes. Of Scott's sincerity there can be no doubt-of Aytoun's there may be much. . . . Aytoun's is the small spite of a schoolboy who confounds impudence with cleverness, and thinks that, because connected with Christopher North, he may indulge in similar freaks of fancy, and present the distaff without the Hercules the contortions without the inspiration-the buffooneries or profanities of Falstaff without his wit, his bonhommie, or his rich originality." Now for the retort courteous :

Enter APOLLODORUS, a Critic.
Why do men call me a presumptuous cur,
A vapouring blockhead, and a turgid fool,
A common nuisance, and a charlatan?
I've dashed into the sea of metaphor
With as strong paddles as the sturdiest ship
That churns Medusæ into liquid light,
And hashed at every object in my way.
My ends are public. I have talked of men
As my familiars, whom I never saw.

Nay-more to raise my credit-I have penned
Epistles to the great ones of the land,

When some attack might make them slightly sore,

Assuring them, in faith, it was not I.

What was their answer? Marry, shortly this:

"Who, in the name of Zernebock, are you?'

I have reviewed myself incessantly

Yea, made a contract with a kindred soul

For mutual interchange of puffery.

Gods!-how we blew each other! But 'tis past

Those halcyon days are gone; and, I suspect,

That in some fit of loathing or disgust,

As Samuel turned from Eli's coarser son, (?)

Mine ancient playmate hath deserted me.
And yet I am Apollodorus still!

I search for genius, having it myself,
With keen and earnest longings. I survive
To disentangle, from the imping wings

Of our young poets, their crustaceous slough

the poems at whose nativity Apollodorus has played Lucina, being those specifically assailed in this satire on the Spasmodic School,-as the LifeDrama of Alexander Smith, Bigg's Night and the Soul, &c. To Apollodorus on the qui vive for a new discovery, there enters one Sancho, a Costermonger, singing as how

Down in the garden behind the wall,
Merrily grows the bright-green leek;
The old sow grunts as the acorns fall,

The winds blow heavy, the little pigs squeak.
One for the litter, and three for the teat-
Hark to their music, Juanna my sweet!

A very godsend for Apollodorus! Seraphic melody to him is the coster-
monger's strain. He thanks heaven that here he has lighted on a genuine
bard, a creature of high impulse, and unsoiled by coarse conventionalities
of rule; on a heaven-born minstrel, who labours not to sing, because his
bright thoughts resolve themselves at once, artlessly, with grace beyond
the reach of art, into truest divinest poesy, without the aid of balanced
artifice, and in all the freshness and simplicity that beseem the songster's
profession. And therefore Apollodorus greets his new protégé in posse
with an emphatic "All hail, great poet!" The great poet, thus arrested
in his inspired career of minstrelsy, wonders what the civil-spoken gent
is after, and evidently suspects him of a design to chaff him.
"Save
you, my merry master," answers the great poet, in courteous return for
the All hail. And then, with an eye to the main chance, he continues :
"Need you any leeks or onions? Here's the primest cauliflower, though
I say it, in all Badajoz. Set it up at a distance of some ten yards, and
I'll forfeit my ass if it does not look bigger than the Alcayde's wig. Or
would these radishes suit your turn? There's nothing like
your radish
for cooling the blood and purging distempered humours."

APOLLODORUS.

I do admire thy vegetables much,

But will not buy them. Pray you, pardon me
For one short word of friendly obloquy.

Is't possible a being so endowed

With music, song, and sun-aspiring thoughts,
Can stoop to chaffer idly in the streets,
And, for a huckster's miserable gain,
Renounce the urgings of his destiny?
Why, man, thine Ass should be a Pegasus,
A sun-reared charger snorting at the stars,
And scattering all the Pleiads at his heels-
Thy cart should be an orient-tinted car,
Such as Aurora drives into the day,

What time the rosy-finger'd Hours awake-
Thy reins-

but here the costermonger puts in his oar. He has been patient up to this swell in the rhapsody; but 'tis the last ounce breaks the camel's back, and the costermonger, who has put up with the allusions to his donkey and his drag, finds the meddling with his "reins" too much for him. So he says, says he, "Lookye, master, I've dusted a better jacket than yours before now, so you had best keep a civil tongue in your head. Once for all, will you buy my radishes ?"

APOLLODORUS.

No!

SANCHO.

Then go to the devil and shake yourself!

[Exit.

APOLLODORUS.

The foul fiend seize thee and thy cauliflowers!
I was indeed a most egregious ass

To take this lubber clodpole for a bard,

And worship that dull fool. Pythian Apollo!
Hear me,-O hear! Towards the firmament
I gaze with longing eyes; and, in the name
Of millions thirsting for poetic draughts,
I do beseech thee, send a poet down!
Let him descend, e'en as a meteor falls,
Rushing at noonday.

[He is crushed by the fall of the body of HAVERILLO. This too literal fulfilment of the suppliant's petition, is occasioned by Firmilian's hurling the said Haverillo, a well-to-do bardling, from the top of the pillar of St. Simeon Stylites, upon which Firmilian has taken an unfurnished lodging, and beneath which the ill-starred Apollodorus is standing when Haverillo comes down with a vengeance. In the dreadful · finale, when Firmilian is hunted to despair and destruction by a set of ignes fatui, amid the damning charges they heap up against him they yet glance with indulgent tenderness on this one good deed, of which indirectly he was the doer, the consigning Apollodorus to "immortal For they say

smash."

Give him some respite-give him some praise-
One good deed he has done in his days;
Chaunt it, and sing it, and tell it in chorus-

He has flattened the cockscomb of Apollodorus !

That the veritable Apollodorus will consider himself utterly smashed by the doughty Firmilian, is more than the most sanguine can expect. Doubtless he will be found alive and kicking in many a paulo-postfuturum "article," which, however and alas, the admirers of Bon Gaultier and readers of "Firmilian" are but too likely never to see or even hear of.

The extraordinary hero of Sydney Yendys' unfinished magnum opus, is answerable for the vagaries and wickedness of Firmilian himself. The murderous empiricism of Balder is illustrated in the soliloquy on the summit of the Stylites' pillar, and that among the lonely mountains where the Student of Badajoz tries to feel the luxury of remorse, and doesn't, can't; no, not for the life of him. He has been as sinful as ever he could; has done to death a batch of his bosom cronies, and a nameless crowd besides; and yet he is unable to enjoy the excitement of a fevered conscience. He has been a wholesale and retail dealer in crime, but cannot make a comfortable return, cannot "realise" a new sensation, such as his soul lusteth after. "Three days have I," he plaintively

murmurs,

Been wandering in this desert wilderness
In search of inspiration. Horrid thoughts,
Phantasms, chimæras, tortures, inward spasms,
Disordered spawn of dreams, distracting visions,
Air-shrieks and haunting terrors were my aim-
Yet nothing comes to fright me!

But he gets into trouble at last, with the Ignes Fatui, who lure him on to confusion and a quarry, on a certain barren moor, where, says he,

-Two years ago,
An old blind beggar came and craved an alms,
Thereby destroying a tremendous thought
Just bursting on my mind-a glorious bud
Of poesy, but blasted ere its bloom!

I bade the old fool take the leftward path,
Which leads to a deep quarry, where he fell-
At least I deem so, for I heard a splash-
But I was gazing on the gibbous moon,
And durst not lower my celestial flight
To care for such an insect-worm as he.

And now the wills-o'-the-wisp make "the seeing man walk in the path of the blind"-mooting impertinent inquiries the while after the fate of one of his recent victims :

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So much for the Balder tragedy. Then again what admirer of Walter and Life-Drama-tics but will recognise the source of inspiration of such verses as these:

or these:

Let the red lightning shoot athwart the sky,
Entangling comets by their spooming hair.
Piercing the Zodiac belt, and carrying dread
To old Orion, and his whimpering hound; &c.

I knew a poet once; and he was young,
And intermingled with such fierce desires
As made pale Eros veil his face with grief,
And caused his lustier brother to rejoice.
He was as amorous as a crocodile'

In the spring season, when the Memphian bank,
Receiving substance from the glaring sun,
Resolves itself from mud into a shore.
And as the scaly creature wallowing there,
In its hot fits of passion, belches forth
The steam from out its nostrils, half in love,
And half in grim defiance of its kind;
Trusting that either from the reedy fen,
Some reptile-virgin coyly may appear,
Or that the hoary Sultan of the Nile

May make tremendous challenge with his jaws,
And, like Mark Antony, assert his right

To all the Cleopatras of the ooze

So fared it with the poet that I knew.

Or, once more, a passionate love-passage in the following strain :

FIRMILIAN.

My Mariana;

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As the great earth lies silent all the night,
And looks with hungry longings on the stars,
Whilst its huge heart beats on its granite ribs
With measured pulsings of delirious joy-
So look I, Mariana, on thine eyes!

Surely it is quite credible that some of the "least-ways" discriminating admirers of the Spasmodic School may, on the strength of these and similar excerpts, come to one of two conclusions—either that this new poet, Percy Jones to wit, is quite equal to Alexander Smith, or that he has unblushingly "cribbed" from the "Life-Drama" its best lines by the dozen.

If there is any vital principle (as surely there is ?) in poets who can write as the authors of "Balder" and the "Life-Drama" can, the satirical rogueries of "Firmilian" will do them no particular harm, and may do them a deal of good. A poetical constitution that wants stamina to survive a heavier blow and greater discouragement than this, must be too puny to deserve length of days. We have hope that the patients mainly concerned, however "Firmilian" may disagree with them at present, will one day allow, each with a cordial experto crede of his own, that, even if it is good for nothing else, at least it is good for

spasms.

THE MAIDEN OF RODENCHILD.

FROM THE GERMAN OF THE LATE DROSTE HÜLSHOF..

BY CAPTAIN MEDWIN.

Is so sultry and close an April night,

So feverish and boiling a maiden's blood?

She shields her eyes from the taper's light,

And lists to her heart-and its ebb and flood

Will day never dawn again on her bower?
She watches-waits 'till her clock strike the hour-
In vain-for moveless the pendulum stood.

—two-and three,

But the watchman now drones one

And ever on-five-six-and seven

Ten-twelve. That scream!-hark! what might it be?

But a hymn mounts over the cry, to Heaven!

"Tis a song of praise-and all hearts rejoice,

Whilst they greet and they hail, as with one voice,

The return of the holy Easter-even.

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