"Why slumbers Gifford?" once was asked in vain;
Why slumbers Gifford? let us ask again.[1]820
Are there no follies for his pen to purge?
Are there no fools whose backs demand the scourge?
Are there no sins for Satire's Bard to greet?
Stalks not gigantic Vice in every street?
Shall Peers or Princes tread Pollution's path,
And 'scape alike the Laws and Muse's wrath?
Nor blaze with guilty glare through future time,
Eternal beacons of consummate crime?
Arouse thee, Gifford! be thy promise claimed,
Make bad men better, or at least ashamed.830
Unhappy White![2] while life was in its spring,
- ↑ Mr. Gifford promised publicly that the Baviad and Mæviad should not be his last original works: let him remember, "Mox in reluctantes dracones." [Cf. New Morality, lines 29-42.]
- ↑ Henry Kirke White died at Cambridge, in October, 1806, in consequence of too much exertion in the pursuit of studies that would have matured a mind which disease and poverty could not impair, and which Death itself destroyed rather than subdued. His poems abound in such beauties as must impress the reader with the liveliest regret that so short a period was allotted to talents, which would have dignified even the sacred functions he was destined to assume.
[H. K. White (1785-1806) published Clifton Grove and other poems in 1803. Two volumes of his Remains, consisting of poems, letters, etc., with a life by Southey, were issued
ticularly "Scotland's Scaith," and the "Waes of War," of which ten thousand copies were sold in one month. [Hector Macneil (1746-1816) wrote in defence of slavery in Jamaica, and was the author of several poems: Scotland's Skaith, or the History of Will and Jean (1795), The Waes of War, or the Upshot of the History of Will and Jean (1796), etc., etc.]
