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CONVERSATIONS OF

Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
And every one, as you may see,
All silent and all d——d!’

“There was a time when he would have written better; but perhaps Peter thinks feelingly.

“The republican trio, when they began to publish in common, were to have had a community of all things, like the ancient Britons; to have lived in a state of nature, like savages, and peopled some ‘island of the blest’ with children in common, like ——. A very pretty Arcadian notion! It amuses me much to compare the Botany Bay Eclogue, the Panegyric of Martin the Regicide, and ‘Wat Tyler,’ with the Laureate Odes, and Peter’s Eulogium on the Field of Waterloo. There is something more than rhyme in that noted stanza containing

‘Yea, slaughter
Is God’s daughter!’[1]

“I offended the par nobile mortally,—past all hope of forgiveness—many years ago. I met, at the Cumberland


  1. Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode.