Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/172

 166 Whitford The accompanying note is: Robert Southy, author of many ingenious pieces of poetry of great promise, if the young gentleman would recollect what old Chaucer says of poetry, " "Tis every dele A rock of ice and not of steel." He gave the public a long quarto volume of epic verses, Joan of Arc, written, as he says in the preface, in six weeks. Had he meant to write well, he should have kept it at least six years. I mention this, for I have been much pleased with many of the young gentleman's little copies of verses. I wish also that he would review some of his principles. 2 * He was mocked deliberately by the poets of the Anti- Jacobin, who accused him of republicanism and sentimentality and were peculiarly disgusted with his attempts at writing English poetry in classical metres. His Sapphics and dactylics they made sufficiently ridiculous in the well known parodies of which the prime example is the cheerful tale of the Needy Knifegrind- er. In another parody of The Soldier's Wife, the poet is thus apostrophized in his own lumbering metre: Wearisome Sonnetteer, feeble and querulous, Painfully dragging out thy demo-cratic lays Moon-stricken Sonnetteer, "ah! for thy heavy chance!" 25 The most talented of verse makers among the writers of the Anti- Jacobin, Canning, attacked the romantic poets in the one formal satire of the magazine, New Morality, but attacked them quite indiscriminately. In a mock-canticle of which one couplet is, All creeping creatures, venomous and low, Paine, Williams, Godwin, Holcroft, praise Lepaux! he introduced these four lines : And ye five other wandering bards, that move In sweet accord of harmony and love, Coleridge and Sou they, Lloyd, and Lamb & Co. Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux! 28 M The Pursuits of Literature, 1st American ed. (Philadelphia, 1800), 294. 25 Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin ... 3d ed. (London, 1890), 41. This parody was the work of Canning and Gifford. 28 Ibid., 285, 284; New Morality, 11. 344-345, 334-337.