for if he might lash and lacerate with Swift, he prefers to tickle and titillate with Addison, and therefore adds, in such a case,
If the last target took a round of grape
To knock its beauty something out of shape,
The next asks only, if the listener please,
A schoolboy's blowpipe and a gill of pease.[1]
Genial and good-natured, accordingly, he appears throughout—using his victims as old Izaak did his bait, as though he loved them—yet taking care that the hook shall do its work. Among the irksome shams of the day, he is "smart" upon those cant-mongers who
With uncouth phrases tire their tender lungs,
The same bald phrases on their hundred tongues;
"Ever" "The Ages" in their page appear,
"Alway" the bedlamite is called a "Seer;"
On every leaf the "earnest" sage may scan,
Portentous bore! their "many-sided" man,—
A weak eclectic, groping vague and dim,
Whose every angle is a half-starved whim,
Blind as a mole and curious as a lynx,
Who rides a beetle, which he calls a "Sphinx."[2]
Here is another home-thrust:
The pseudo-critic-editorial race
Owns no allegiance but the law of place;
Each to his region sticks through thick and thin,
Stiff as a beetle spiked upon a pin.
Plant him in Boston, and his sheet he fills
With all the slipslop of his threefold hills,
Talks as if Nature kept her choicest smiles
Within his radius of a dozen miles,
And nations waited till his next Review
Had made it plain what Providence must do.
Would you believe him, water is not damp
Except in buckets with the Hingham stamp,
And Heaven should build the walls of Paradise
Of Quincy granite lined with Wenham ice.[3]
Elsewhere he counsels thus, festina lente, his impetuous compatriots:
Don't catch the fidgets; you have found your place
Just in the focus of a nervous race,
Fretful to change, and rabid to discuss,
Full of excitements, always in a fuss;—
Think of the patriarchs; then compare as men
These lean-cheeked maniacs of the tongue and pen!
Run, if you like, but try to keep your breath;
Work like a man, but don't be worked to death;
And with new notions,—let me change the rule,—
Don't strike the iron till it's slightly cool.[4]
Once more: there is pithy description in a list he furnishes of
Poems that shuffle with superfluous legs
A blindfold minuet over addled eggs,
