The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 7 | Page 7

a narrowness in such a notion,?Which makes me wish you'd change your lakes for Ocean.
VI.
I would not imitate the petty thought,?Nor coin my self-love to so base a vice,?For all the glory your conversion brought,?Since gold alone should not have been its price.?You have your salary; was 't for that you wrought??And Wordsworth has his place in the Excise.[5]?You're shabby fellows--true--but poets still,?And duly seated on the Immortal Hill.
VII.
Your bays may hide the baldness of your brows--?Perhaps some virtuous blushes;--let them go--?To you I envy neither fruit nor boughs--?And for the fame you would engross below,?The field is universal, and allows?Scope to all such as feel the inherent glow:?Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe, will try?'Gainst you the question with posterity.
VIII.
For me, who, wandering with pedestrian Muses,?Contend not with you on the wing��d steed,?I wish your fate may yield ye, when she chooses,?The fame you envy, and the skill you need;?And, recollect, a poet nothing loses?In giving to his brethren their full meed?Of merit--and complaint of present days?Is not the certain path to future praise.
IX.
He that reserves his laurels for posterity?(Who does not often claim the bright reversion)?Has generally no great crop to spare it, he?Being only injured by his own assertion;?And although here and there some glorious rarity?Arise like Titan from the sea's immersion,?The major part of such appellants go?To--God knows where--for no one else can know.
X.
If, fallen in evil days on evil tongues,[6]?Milton appealed to the Avenger, Time,?If Time, the Avenger, execrates his wrongs,?And makes the word "Miltonic" mean "_Sublime_,"?_He_ deigned not to belie his soul in songs,?Nor turn his very talent to a crime;?_He_ did not loathe the Sire to laud the Son,?But closed the tyrant-hater he begun.
XI.
Think'st thou, could he--the blind Old Man--arise?Like Samuel from the grave, to freeze once more?The blood of monarchs with his prophecies,?Or be alive again--again all hoar?With time and trials, and those helpless eyes,?And heartless daughters--worn--and pale[7]--and poor; Would _he_ adore a sultan? _he_ obey?The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh?[8]
XII.
Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant!?Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,?And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,?Transferred to gorge upon a sister shore,?The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,?With just enough of talent, and no more,?To lengthen fetters by another fixed,?And offer poison long already mixed.
XIII.
An orator of such set trash of phrase?Ineffably--legitimately vile,?That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise,?Nor foes--all nations--condescend to smile,--?Nor even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze?From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil,?That turns and turns to give the world a notion?Of endless torments and perpetual motion.
XIV.
A bungler even in its disgusting trade,?And botching, patching, leaving still behind?Something of which its masters are afraid--?States to be curbed, and thoughts to be confined,?Conspiracy or Congress to be made--?Cobbling at manacles for all mankind--?A tinkering slave-maker, who mends old chains,?With God and Man's abhorrence for its gains.
XV.
If we may judge of matter by the mind,?Emasculated to the marrow _It_?Hath but two objects, how to serve, and bind,?Deeming the chain it wears even men may fit,?Eutropius of its many masters,[9]--blind?To worth as freedom, wisdom as to wit,?Fearless--because _no_ feeling dwells in ice,?Its very courage stagnates to a vice.[10]
XVI.
Where shall I turn me not to _view_ its bonds,?For I will never _feel_ them?--Italy!?Thy late reviving Roman soul desponds?Beneath the lie this State-thing breathed o'er thee[11]-- Thy clanking chain, and Erin's yet green wounds,?Have voices--tongues to cry aloud for me.?Europe has slaves--allies--kings--armies still--?And Southey lives to sing them very ill.
XVII.
Meantime, Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate,?In honest simple verse, this song to you.?And, if in flattering strains I do not predicate,?'T is that I still retain my "buff and blue;"[12]?My politics as yet are all to educate:?Apostasy's so fashionable, too,?To keep _one_ creed's a task grown quite Herculean;?Is it not so, my Tory, ultra-Julian?[13]
Venice, Sept. 16, 1818.
FOOTNOTES:
{3}[1] ["As the Poem is to be published anonymously, _omit_ the Dedication. I won't attack the dog in the dark. Such things are for scoundrels and renegadoes like himself" [_Revise_]. See, too, letter to Murray, May 6, 1819 (_Letters_, 1900, iv. 294); and Southey's letter to Bedford, July 31, 1819 (_Selections from the Letters, etc._, 1856, in. 137, 138). According to the editor of the _Works of Lord Byron_, 1833 (xv. 101), the existence of the Dedication "became notorious" in consequence of Hobhouse's article in the _Westminster Review_, 1824. He adds, for Southey's consolation and encouragement, that "for several years the verses have been selling in the streets as a broadside," and that "it would serve no purpose to exclude them on the present occasion." But Southey was not appeased. He tells Allan Cunningham (June 3, 1833) that "the new edition of Byron's works is ... one of the very worst symptoms of these bad times" (_Life and Correspondence_, 1850, vi. 217).]
{4}[2] [In the "Critique on _Bertram_," which Coleridge contributed to the _Courier_, in 1816, and republished in