Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 1.djvu/395

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ENGLISH BARDS, AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS.
353

Why should we call them from their dark abode,
In broad St. Giles's or in Tottenham-Road?710
Or (since some men of fashion nobly dare
To scrawl in verse) from Bond-street or the Square?[1]
If things of Ton their harmless lays indite,
Most wisely doomed to shun the public sight,
What harm? in spite of every critic elf,
Sir T. may read his stanzas to himself;
Miles Andrews[2] still his strength in couplets try,
And live in prologues, though his dramas die.
Lords too are Bards: such things at times befall,
And 'tis some praise in Peers to write at all.720
Yet, did or Taste or Reason sway the times,

Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes?[3]

    (where he reposes with Ferdousi and Sadi, the Oriental Homer and Catullus), and behold his name assumed by one Stott of Dromore, the most impudent and execrable of literary poachers for the Daily Prints?

  1. From Grosvenor Place or Square.—[MS. British Bards.]
  2. [Miles Peter Andrews (d. 1824) was the owner of large powder-mills at Dartford. He was M.P. for Bewdley. He held a good social position, but his intimate friends were actors and playwrights. His Better Late than Never (which Reynolds and Topham helped him to write) was played for the first time at Drury Lane, October 17, 1790, with Kemble as Saville, and Mrs. Jordan as Augusta. He is mentioned in The Baviad, l. 10; and in a note Gifford satirizes his prologue to Lorenzo, and describes him as an "industrious paragraph-monger."]
  3. [In a manuscript fragment, bound in the same volume as British Bards, we find these lines:—

    "In these, our times, with daily wonders big,
    A Lettered peer is like a lettered pig;
    Both know their Alphabet, but who, from thence,
    Infers that peers or pigs have manly sense?
    Still less that such should woo the graceful nine;
    Parnassus was not made for lords and swine."]