Whose mingling taste combined to cull the wreath
While Attic flowers Aonian odours breathe,
And all their renovated fragrance flung,
To grace the beauties of your native tongue;
Now let those minds, that nobly could transfuse
The glorious Spirit of the Grecian Muse,
Though soft the echo, scorn a borrowed tone:[1]
Resign Achaia's lyre, and strike your own.890
Let these, or such as these, with just applause,[2]
Restore the Muse's violated laws;
But not in flimsy Darwin's[3] pompous chime,[4]
That mighty master of unmeaning rhyme,
Whose gilded cymbals, more adorned than clear,
The eye delighted, but fatigued the ear,
- ↑
Translation's servile work at length disown
And quit Achaia's Muse to court your own.—[MS. Addition to British Bards.] - ↑ Let these arise and anxious of applause.—[British Bards. MS.]
- ↑ [Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the grandfather of Charles Robert Darwin. Coleridge describes his poetry as "nothing but a succession of landscapes or paintings. It arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the rapidity necessary to pathos."—Anima Poetæ, 1895, p. 5. His chief works are The Botanic Garden (1789-92) and The Temple of Nature (1803). Byron's censure of The Botanic Garden is inconsistent with his principles, for Darwin's verse was strictly modelled on the lines of Pope and his followers. But the Loves of the Triangles had laughed away the Loves of the Plants.]
- ↑ But not in heavy.—[British Bards. MS.]
Herman Merivale (1779-1844), who subsequently, in 1813, was joint editor with him of Collections from the Greek Anthology, etc.]
