Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/83

 Rh book he goes on to say, " is a medley of sense and nonsense, the latter largely predominating, since his fundamental position is that we cannot accentuate a short vowel, without lengthen- it ! But the wit and versatility of the writing make it unique among the dreary tomes of this controversy." Mathias again fastened on his old enemy. This time it was in the fourth dialogue of the " Pursuits of literature." The lines themselves were feeble, and stingless. The venom was in the note and Mathias loved a lengthy note. His point was that the Metronariston was dedicated " without any permission and I think with considerable effrontery to Mr. Bryant in a style perfectly new." He dubs each page of the tract "sillier wilder and more extravagant" than the preced- ing, and sums it up as a " farrago of learned nonsense." Mrs. Thicknesse in her " school for fashion " (1800, 2 vols.) quotes that "late worthy and most respectable character" Dr. Warner as writing some lines of poetry on his return to England, " a three years' stranger to my native land " on the altered disposition of the ladies of his country. He had left them behind in 1790 the " coyest and loveliest of the female kind." They were then " as chaste and modest as the unsunn'd snow " and they came in his view " To angels nearest in this world below." When he came back to Dover's strand in 1793 they were without waist and without modesty. Some of his observations on returning to England were couched in prose and in satire. The country from which he had escaped was depicted on this side of the channel as in the direst straits of poverty, while England revelled in affluence. " Bread " said Warner, writing in London, " costs me fifteen-pence the quartern loaf, a beefsteak and a bottle of wine drains my pocket of between five and six shillings — for fifteen pence I had in this famished country on the other side of the water, my soup, my fish, my gtgot, and my dessert,