As if some angel spoke agen, “All peace on earth, good-will to men;" With more than mortal powers endow'd. How high they soar'd above the crowd! Theirs was no common party race, Jostling by dark intrigue for place; Like fabled Gods, their mighty war Shook realms and nations in its jar; Beneath each banner proud to stand, Look'd up the noblest of the land, Till through the British world were known The names of PITT and Fox alone. Spells of such force no wizard grave E'er framed in dark Thessalian cave, Though his could drain the ocean dry, And force the planets from the sky. These spells are spent, and, spent with these, Genius, and taste, and talent gone, 'T will trickle to his rival's bier; Rest, ardent Spirits! till the cries Not even your Britain's groans can pierce Then, O, how impotent and vain This grateful tributary strain! Though not unmark'd from northern clime, Ye heard the Border Minstrel's rhyme: His Gothic harp has o'er you rung; The Bard you deign'd to praise, your deathless names has sung. Stay yet, illusion, stay a while, My wilder'd fancy still beguile! From this high theme how can I part, Ere half unloaded is my heart! For all the tears e'er sorrow drew, That throbs through bard in bard-like mood, Prompt on unequal tasks to run, In plucking from yon fen the reed, With which the milkmaid cheers her way She trips it down the uneven dale: Meeter for me, by yonder cairn, But thou, my friend, can'st fitly tell, (For few have read romance so well,) How still the legendary lay O'er poet's bosom holds its sway; Despising spells and demons' force, Holds converse with the unburied corse ;' The mightiest chiefs of British song 'See Appendix, Note A. * See Appendix, Note B. 1 They gleam through Spenser's elfin dream, Had raised the Table Round again,' Dryden's melancholy account of his projected Epic Poem, blasted by the selfish and sordid parsimony of his patrons, is contained in an "Essay on Satire," addressed to the Earl of Dorset, and prefixed to the Translation of Juvenal. After mentioning a plan of supplying machinery from the guardian angels of kingdoms, mentioned in the Book of Daniel, he adds, "Thus, my lord, I have, as briefly as I could, given your lordship, and by you the world, a rude draught of what I have been long labouring in my imagination, and what I had intended to have put in practice; (though far unable for the attempt of such a poem;) and to have left the stage, to which my genius never much inclined me, for a work which would have taken up my life in the performance of it. This, too, I had intended chiefly for the honour of my native country, to which a poet is particularly obliged. Of two subjects, both relating to it, I was doubtful whether I should choose that of King Arthur conquering the Saxons, which, being farther distant in time, gives the greater scope to my invention; or that of Edward the Black Prince, in subduing Spain, and restoring it to the lawful prince, though a great tyrant, Don Pedro the Cruel; which, for the compass of time, including only the expedition of one year, for the greatness of the action, and its answerable event, for the magnanimity of the English hero, opposed to the ingratitude of the person whom he restored, and for the many beautiful episodes which I had interwoven with the principal design, together with the characters of the chiefest English persons, (wherein, after Virgil and Spenser, I would have taken occasion to represent my living friends and patrons of the noblest families, and also shadowed the events of future ages in the succession of our imperial line,)— with these helps, and those of the machines which I have mentioned, I might perhaps have done as well as some of my predecessors, or at least chalked out a way for others to amend my errors in a like design; but being encouraged only with fair |