Furious he rode, where late he ran,

Lashing and spurring his tame hobby; Turned to a formal puritan,

A solemn and unsexual man,—

He half believed White Obi.

This steed in vision he would ride,
High trotting over nine-inch bridges,
With Flibbertigibbet, imp of pride,
Mocking and mowing by his side-
A mad-brained goblin for a guide-
Over corn-fields, gates, and hedges.

After these ghastly rides, he came

Home to his heart, and found from thence Much stolen of its accustomed flame;

His thoughts grew weak, drowsy, and lame Of their intelligence.

To Peter's view, all seemed one hue;

He was no whig, he was no tory;

No Deist and no Christian he:

He got so subtle, that to be

Nothing, was all his glory.

One single point in his belief

From his organization sprung, The heart-enrooted faith, the chief Ear in his doctrines' blighted sheaf, That "happiness is wrong."

So thought Calvin and Dominic ;

So think their fierce successors, who
Even now would neither stint nor stick
Our flesh from off our bones to pick,
If they might "do their do."

His morals thus were undermined :—
The old Peter-the hard, old Potter
Was born anew within his mind;
He grew dull, harsh, sly, unrefined,
As when he tramped beside the Otter.*

In the death hues of agony
Lambently flashing from a fish,
Now Peter felt amused to see
Shades like a rainbow's rise and flee,
Mixed with a certain hungry wish.†

* A famous river in the New Atlantis of the Dynastophylic Pantisocratists.

† See the description of the beautiful colours produced during the agonizing death of a number of trout, in the fourth part of a long poem in blank verse, published within a few years. That poem contains curious evidence of the gradual hardening of a strong but circumscribed sensibility, of the perversion of a penetrating but panic-stricken understanding. The author might have derived a lesson which he had probably forgotten from these sweet and sublime verses:—

This lesson, shepherd, let us two divide,

Taught both by what she shows and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride

With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

a Nature.

So in his Country's dying face
He looked-and lovely as she lay,
Seeking in vain his last embrace,
Wailing her own abandoned case,

With hardened sneer he turned away;

And coolly to his own soul said :

"Do you not think that we might make A poem on her when she's dead? Or, no-a thought is in my head— Her shroud for a new sheet I'll take;

"My wife wants one.-Let who will bury This mangled corpse! And I and you, My dearest Soul, will then make merry, As the Prince Regent did with Sherry,Ay-and at last desert me too."

And so his soul would not be gay,

But moaned within him; like a fawn

Moaning within a cave, it lay

Wounded and wasting, day by day,
Till all its life of life was gone.

As troubled skies stain waters clear,

The storm in Peter's heart and mind Now made his verses dark and queer: They were the ghosts of what they were,

Shaking dim grave-clothes in the wind.

For he now raved enormous folly,

Of Baptisms, Sunday-schools, and Graves; "Twould make George Colman melancholy, To have heard him, like a male Molly, Chaunting those stupid staves.

Yet the Reviews, who heaped abuse
On Peter while he wrote for freedom,
So soon as in his song they spy
The folly which soothes tyranny,
Praise him, for those who feed 'em.

"He was a man, too great to scan ;

A planet lost in truth's keen rays:
His virtue, awful and prodigious;
He was the most sublime, religious,
Pure-minded poet of these days."

As soon as he read that, cried Peter,
"Eureka! I have found the way
To make a better thing of metre
Than e'er was made by living creature
Up to this blessed day."

Then Peter wrote odes to the Devil,
In one of which he meekly said:

"May Carnage and Slaughter,
Thy niece and thy daughter,
May Rapine and Famine,

Thy gorge ever cramming,

Glut thee with living and dead!

Flit

up

from hell with pure intent!

Slash them at Manchester,

Glasgow, Leeds and Chester;

Drench all with blood from Avon to Trent.

"Let thy body-guard yeomen

Hew down babes and women

And laugh with bold triumph till Heaven be rent! When Moloch in Jewry,

Munched children with fury,

It was thou, Devil, dining with pure intent."*

Cob

*It is curious to observe how often extremes meet. bett and Peter use the same language for a different purpose: Peter is indeed a sort of metrical Cobbett. Cobbett is, however, more mischievous than Peter, because he pollutes a holy and now unconquerable cause with the principles of legitimate murder; whilst the other only makes a bad one ridiculous and odious.

If either Peter or Cobbett should see this note, each will feel more indignation at being compared to the other than at any censure implied in the moral perversion laid to their charge.