Page:The poetical works of Leigh Hunt, containing many pieces now first collected 1849.djvu/128

$\scriptstyle {\left.{\begin{matrix}\ \\\\\ \ \end{matrix}}\right\}\,}$Betham, Blackwood, Bowles, Bray, and Miss Browne, too, were there;
What a sweet load of B's! But then what a despair!
For I know not their writings. (I'm tearing my hair!)

Cary Burney came next,^[1] so precise yet so trusting,
Her heroines are perfect, and yet not disgusting.
"However," said Phœbus, "I can't quite approve them:
Conceit follows close on the mere right to love them."

Then came Fanny Butler, perplex'd at her heart
Betwixt passion and elegance, nature and art;
The daughter of sense and of grace, yet made wroth
With her own finer wit by o'er-straining at both.
Phœbus smil'd on her parents, who stood there in sight,
And quoted some lines from her play about "Night."

Marg'ret Cullen succeeded, whose novels one lives in,
Like one of her hamlets, where talk never gives in;
Dear, kind-hearted, arch-humour'd, home-loving dame;
And to sum up all eulogy,—worthy her name.^[2]
"You make me sleep sometimes," quoth Phœbus, "'tis true;
But I do even that, let me tell you, with few."

"Lady Dacre."—'Twas pleasant to see the god raise,
In honour of her and of Petrarch, his bays.^[3]

1. Authoress of "Traits of Nature" "Country Neighbours," &c. A niece of Madame d'Arblay.
2. Miss Cullen, authoress of "Home," &c., a descendant, if I mistake not, of the great and good Scottish physician.
3. See translations of sonnets from Petrarch in Ugo Foscolo's masterley Essays on that poet, particularly the one about the pilgrim. Lady Dacre is celebrated for her powers in sculpture,