98 2. Wherein it is But ye remorseless rhymesters, spare the King! earnestly requested of the poets of Dublin, not to slay the King after the fashion of Ankerstroem or Ravillac. Have some compassion on your own liege Lord! Were he to death by Dublin poets bored. And the newspapers have their pens prepared. Let none attempt to greet the King, save such great bards as I. A WELCOME TO HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE THE FOURTH, ON HIS ARRIVAL IN IRELAND, MDCCCXXI. MY DEAR SIR,-As I lifted up my voice, and wept over the great nationail calamity which overspread my native land last year, (I need not say the death of Sir Daniel,) I think it right to rejoice now in the general joy of Ireland at the arrival of the King. I choose the same metre as that which I used in the Luctus, it being, as Beattie well observes of the Spenserian stanza, equally adapted to the grave and the gay. Of course, as before, I recommend it to be sung by my old friend Terry Magrath. The Director at the corner will be saying every where that it was he who wrote this song, or at least that he connived at it, but don't believe him, it being all excogitated by My dear sir, CORK INSTITUTION, Aug. 1, 1821. Your's till death us do part, R. D. R. A WELCOME TO HIS MAJESTY. [Tune Groves of Blarney.] Synoptical Analysis for the Benefit of Young Persons studying this Song. Stanza I. Welcome in general; in the following verses the specific excellencies of Ireland are stated. Stanza II. 1. National meat and drink and valour. Stanza III. 2. National riot in a superior stlye. Stanza IV. 3. National music. Stanza V. 4. National oratory. Stanza VI. 5. National gallantry. Stanzas VII. and VIII. National uproari ousness. All these offered for the diversion of the King. YOU'RE Welcome over, my royal rover, You'll never spy land, like this our island, Our hills and mountains, our streams and fountains, Our towns and cities all so bright, Our salt-sea harbours, our grass-green arbours, Our greasy larders will glad your sight. 2. "Tis here you'll eat, too, the gay potato, And you'll get frisky upon our whisky, Which, were you dumb, would make you sing; And you'll see dashers, and tearing slashers, 3. Just say the word, and you'll see a riot Such recreation to you could show, 4. And as for music, 'tis you'll be suited 5. Then there's our speaking, and bright speech-making, When in its glory it comes before you, "Twould melt the heart of a cabbage stump. 'Tis so met'phoric, and paregoric, As fine as Doric or Attic Greek, "Twould make Mark Tully look very dully, "Oh, Sire! though your will were as hard to attain, Derry down, &c. "From the Land's End to far Johnny Groat's, if a man "We have Morris, the potent physician of Wales, "We have sage Kempferhausen, the grave and serene; Hugh Mullion, the Grass-market merchant so sly, Derry down, &c. "We have also James Hogg, the great shepherd Chaldean, As sweetly who sings as Anacreon the Teian; We have Delta, whose verses as smooth are as silk; "We have Dr Pendragon, the D. D. from York, "We have Seward of Christchurch, with cap and with gown, A prizeman, a wrangler, and clerk of renown; And Buller of Brazen-nose, potent to seek A blinker for fools, from the mines of the Greek. Derry down, &c. "Nicol Jarvie from Glasgow, the last, and the best "We have Ciecro Dowden, who sports by the hour, Derry down," &c. Methought that the King look'd around him, and smiled; But the best came the last, for with duke and with lord, But before I conclude, may each man at this board SYLVANUS URBAN AND CHRISTOPHER NORTH. GENTLE READer, TIME makes a few changes, not only in kingdoms and manners, but also in periodicals. We have now got before us the lucubrations of Sylvanus Urban, Gent. for the year 1761, and have much amused ourselves with contrasting them with the magazine labours of the present day, and more especially with our own. What an alteration has the interval between two coronations produced!-Sylvanus Urban and Christopher North. The one is an antithesis of the other. The latter is all life, buoyancy, and fire, while the former is the personification of homeliness and heaviness. The tendency of the one is continually upwards, while the other is carried downwards by supernatural force of gravitation. We never say or write a dull or stupid thing, while our worthy predecessor proses and doses to eternity. We are, however, mindful of the ties of relationship which subsist between us, and therefore do not scorn the humbler, but equally necessary pages, of that ancient pattern of urbanity. He was to us what the frugal shopkeeper, the founder of his family, is to the dashing young heir his grandson, who inherits the accumulated products of his industry. The one, mindful of pounds, shillings, and pence, keeps to his dirty shop in Threadneedle Street, or Mincing Alley, and jogs along the "even tenor of his way," without ever emerging into the airy regions of gaiety and fashion. To him all the world is contained within the limits of his daily occupation; he has no idea of further extending his researches. Bond Street and Berkeley Square are no more to him than the Giants' Causeway or the Orkney Islands-he is satisfied in his own sphere. His successor, on the other hand, looks not to the east, but to the west. Full of the spirit of youth and life, he scatters around him his income with generous prodigality of soul, and the very Antipodes of narrowness and regularity, he breaks through all humdrum restraints, and follows wherever the irrepressible and inexhaustible elasticity of his mind impels him. We have often smiled within ourselves at the thought of the consternation which a Number of our Work would have caused about sixty years since, were it possible for one to have appeared, even but in a vision, to our forefathers. The venerable Sylvanus would instaneously have been petrified with surprise, and, like old Eli, would have fallen down in his chair at the news and broke his back. The whole tribe of allegory and essay writers would have been compelled to use the exclamation of Othello, and mourn over their departed vocation. After one smack of the high-flavoured and exciting viands of our table, the public taste would have become too fastidious to relish the homeliness of their ordinary repasts. Nothing plain or unseasoned would have served; our literary cookery would have tickled them too much to allow them to bear with less skilful and scientific provisions. What a pity that "My Grandmother,"* respectable old woman as she is, did not take to writing in those days! then, undoubtedly, was her time. Why she would have been considered as a very prodigy amongst her kind for clever writing. Even her lumbering heaviness, which renders her rather a dangerous article on shipboard, might in those happy days have been considered as volatility itself. Such is the misfortune of not paying sufficient attention to times and seasons in our enterprizes, and of being born either too soon or too late. But we were speaking of ourselves. We can picture the astonishment which would have pervaded the world of literature had one of our Numbers, for instance the present, been able to anticipate its See Don Juan. existence by about sixty years, and to figure away at the coronation of George the Third, instead of that of his worthy successor, whom God long preserve. Ossian himself, that apocryphal personage, and the Boy of Bristol, would have created less controversy and contention. It would have given a kind of St Vitus's dance to every limb of the mighty body of letters, and would have operated like an electrical shock. In short, good reader, you may probably have observed, if you are in the habit of making use of soda powders, the effect which is produced by the infusion of cold water on the particles as they lie scattered at the bottom of the glass. The cold and translucid lymph, late so calm and motionless, effervesces instantaneously, and boils upwards in foaming agitation, moved as if by a spirit. Such and so potent would have been the effect of one Number of our astonishing Miscellany. The names of O'Doherty, Kempferhausen, Wastle, Timothy Tickler, and Lauerwinckel, must certainly ever preclude imitators; yet there were unquestionably many men of that period to which we have alluded, whom we think we could have made something of in the way of contributors. There was Johnson, for instance. To be sure his style is not of the fittest for our airy and etherial pages, and his wit is rather too clumsy for us, who delight more to use the razor than the hatchet. Properly trained, however, we think the old fellow might have been made to do great things. We have a notion he could have written a very forcible letter, though a Cockney himself, on Cockneys and Cockneyism, and occasionally we might have suffered him to take up, in conjunction with our friend, Timothy Tickler, the reviewing department of our work, provided the subject was not poetry; his Rasselas, after being entirely rewritten by ourselves, we might probably have inserted, but his Ramblers we should have taken the liberty of declining. As for Goldsmith, he would have just done for us. All our readers, we dare say, remember his account of the Common Council-man's visit to see the coronation of George the Third. In what an admirable spirit is it written! We should actually not have been ashamed of inserting it in our Magazine. Hear but Mr Grograms consultations with his wife. "Grizzle," said I to her, "Grizzle, my dear, consider that you are but weakly, always ailing, and will never bear sitting out all night upon the scaffold. You remember what a cold you caught the last fast day, by rising but half an before your time to go to church, and how I was scolded as the cause of it. Besides, my dear, our daughter, Anna Amelia Wilhelmina Carolina will look like a perfect fright if she sits up, and you know the girl's face is something, at her time of life, considering her fortune is but small. Mr Grogram,' replied my wife, 'Mr Grogram, this is always the case when you find me in spirits. I don't want to go out, I own, I don't care whether I go at all; it is seldom that I am in spirits, but this is always the case." In short, sir, what will you have on't? to the coronation we went." Poor Goldy, he would have written an excellent series for our Magazine, and we would have paid him handsomely. What a pity he did not live in the days of Blackwood. Burke, too, would have been of some use to us in any political department. To be sure he was rather whiggish at his outset, but we could have fully satisfied him, we think, as to this point. A letter or two of his to certain noble lords, whom we have in view, would have suited us exactly. Churchhill, it must be acknowledged, was a sad fellow-relentlessly indiscriminate in abusive satire; his only excuse is, that he did not live within the period of our publication. He was, however, an engine of power, though improperly directed, and we could have turned him, we think, to very considerable use. What a fine character he would have drawn of the amiable Scotsman! How minutely would he have marked the different features of this Ursa Major, and how glowingly he would have coloured the whole. He would have transfixed him in the very act of shedding the venom of his spleen over the brightest characters of his country. Gray would have done very well for the Diletante Society, and very well for our Magazine. He was a man of taste, and of habits of thinking and writing something like our own, and, in spite of his whims and his delicacies, we are confident we should have agreed to a tittle. As for the rest, they would all have had their posts, some in the higher and some in the lower chambers of our temple of immortali |