May Moorland weavers[1] boast Pindaric skill,
And tailors' lays be longer than their bill!
While punctual beaux reward the grateful notes,
And pay for poems—when they pay for coats.
To the famed throng now paid the tribute due,[2]
Neglected Genius! let me turn to you.800
Come forth, oh Campbell! give thy talents scope;
Who dares aspire if thou must cease to hope?
And thou, melodious Rogers! rise at last,
- ↑ Vide Recollections of a Weaver in the Moorlands of Staffordshire. [The exact title is The Moorland Bard; or Poetical Recollections of a Weaver., etc. 2 vols., 1807. The author was T. Bakewell, who also wrote A Domestic Guide to Insanity, 1805.]
- ↑ None since the past have claimed the tribute due.—[British Bards. MS.]
- ↑ It would be superfluous to recall to the mind of the reader the authors of The Pleasures of Memory and The Pleasures of Hope, the most beautiful didactic poems in our language, if we except Pope's Essay on Man: but so many poetasters have started up, that even the names of Campbell and Rogers are become strange.—[Beneath this note Byron scribbled, in 1816,—
"Pretty Miss Jaqueline
Had a nose aquiline,
And would assert rude
Things of Miss Gertrude,
While Mr. Marmion
Led a great army on,
Making Kehama look
Like a fierce Mameluke.""I have been reading," he says, in 1813, Memory again, and Hope together, and retain all my preference of the former. His elegance is really wonderful—there is no such a thing as a vulgar line in his book." In the annotations of 1816, Byron remarks, "Rogers has not fulfilled the promise of his first poems, but has still very great merit."]
