The clear brook babbling through the goodly plain:
The groves of Granta, and her Gothic halls,
King's Coll—Cam's stream—stained windows, and old walls:
Or, in adventurous numbers, neatly aims
To paint a rainbow, or—the river Thames.[1]30
You sketch a tree, and so perhaps may shine[2]—
But daub a shipwreck like an alehouse sign;
You plan a vase—it dwindles to a pot;
Then glide down Grub-street—fasting and forgot;
Laughed into Lethe by some quaint Review,
Whose wit is never troublesome till—true.
In fine, to whatsoever you aspire,
Let it at least be simple and entire.
- ↑ "While pure Description held the place of Sense."—Pope, Prol. to the Sat., L. 148.
"While Mr. Sol decked out all so glorious
Shines like a Beau in his Birthday Embroidery."[Fielding, Tom Thumb, act i. sc. 1.]—[MS. M.]"Fas est et ab Hoste doceri." In the 7th Art. of the 31st No. of the Edinburgh Review (vol. xvi. Ap. 1810) the "Observations" of an Oxford Tutor are compared to "Children's Cradles" (page 181), then to a "Barndoor fowl flying" (page 182), then the man himself to "a Coach-horse on the Trottoir" (page 185) etc., etc., with a variety of other conundrums all tending to prove that the ingenuity of comparison increases in proportion to the dissimilarity between the things compared.—[MS. L. (b) erased.]
- ↑
Although you sketch a tree which Taste endures,
Your ill-daubed Shipwreck shocks the Connoisseurs.—[MS. M.]
