Oh! send them to the sullen mansions dun,
Her baleful eyes where Sorrow rolls around;
Where gloom-enamour'd Mischief loves to dwell,
And Murder, all blood-bolter'd, schemes the wound.
When cates luxuriant pile the spacious dish,
And purple nectar glads the festive hour;
The guest, without a want, without a wish,
Can yield no room to Music's soothing pow'r.
Some of the old legendary stories put in verse by modern writers provoked him to caricature[1] them thus one day at Streatham; but they are already well-known, I am sure.
The tender infant, meek and mild,
Fell down upon the stone;
The nurse took up the squealing child,
But still the child squeal'd on[2].
A famous ballad also, beginning Rio verde, Rio verde, when I commended the translation of it, he said he could do it better himself—as thus:
Glassy water, glassy water,
Down whose current clear and strong,
Chiefs confus'd in mutual slaughter,
Moor and Christian roll along[3].
- ↑ Caricature is not in Johnson's Dictionary.
- ↑ Wordsworth says of the imitators of the Reliques, and of Johnson's attack on the old ballads:—'The critic triumphed, the legendary imitators were deservedly disregarded, and as undeservedly, their ill-imitated models sank in this country into temporary neglect . . . Dr. Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labours . . . that, though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos . . . yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of the Hermit of Warkworth, a diction scarcely in any one of its features distinguishable from the vague, the glossy, and unfeeling language of his day.' Wordsworth's Works, ed. 1857, vi. 372. Percy himself described his Reliques as 'such a strange collection of trash.' Nichols's Literary History, vii. 577.Johnson had helped Percy in the publication of the Reliques. Life, iii. 276, n. 2; Letters, i. 89.
- ↑
'Rio verde, rio verde,
Quanto cuerpo en ti se baña
De Cristianos y de Moros
Muertos por la dura espada.'
'Gentle river, gentle river,
Lo, thy streams are stain'd with gore!
Many a brave and noble captain
Floats along thy willow'd shore.'
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, vol. i. Bk. iii. No. 16.
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