198 Notes of the Month on ^August, 



copal-looking personage, from Sir Robert Peel upwards, to the " Mem- 

 ber for the Missionaries." " Honi soit qui mal y pense." We honour 

 a man of talents for his industry, a man of character for his keeping 

 his peri clear of the fashionable that " sells" and does nothing else, and 

 a man of virtue for his doing his best to turn the vulgar-great to decent 

 studies. All the three is Southey. But we cannot abide his extra- 

 ordinary passion for paradoxes. No man alive feels so much delight at 

 astounding the f)07ia Jide believer in his pen, by the metempsychosis of 

 a cobbler into a poet. The village scribe who has delivered his genius 

 down to a laughing posterity, in the shape of those horrible specimens 

 of verse, which figure in our church-yards, becomes, vmder the Doctor's 

 transforming fingers, a genius of the first water ; a little neglected, 'tis 

 true ; and from " the unhappy taste of the time," now and then sus- 

 pected of Sternhold and Hopkinsism, but a true genius after all : sub- 

 lime upon sign-posts, and profound upon workliouse walls ; memorable, 

 if he had been remembered ; and distinguished, if he had not, by nature 

 and by fate, quietly sunk into the mire in which he was born. From 

 this " fount and origin of evil" has proceeded all the prose poetry of 

 our late inspired tailors, hedgers, and washerwomen. Somebody or 

 other is, at this hour, publishing (so far has the mania extended, of 

 which the Doctor inflicted the first bite) " The Scattered Thoughts, 

 epic, tragic, and otherwise, of a Journeyman Bricklayer, who has never 

 learned to read or write." In Southey 's new compilation of the British 

 Poets, he has begun on the same principle, and we have, amongst the 

 rest, a desperate attempt to lift Skelton, the totally unknown author of 

 some hundred verses worse than any thing in the world, except all the 

 Drury-lane and Covent-garden tragedies of the last ten years. For a 

 slight sketch of this Bard's life, we are told, 



" Skelton was curate of Troinpington, near Cambridge, the well-known scene 

 of the Miller's Tale, and rector of gloomy Dis, in Norfolk, in the diocese of that 

 infamous persecutor. Bishop Nix. The prelate, in his own atrocious language, 

 might well have considered Skelton as one savouring of the frying-pan, for the 

 poet had directed his merciless satire in full force against the friars and the 

 clergy ; but he seems to have balanced the account by attacking the reformers in 

 the same strain. The bishop suspended hira for keeping a concubine. On his 

 death-bed, he declared that he conscientiously considered her as his wife, but that 

 cowardliness had prevented him from acknowledging her in that character ; for 

 that he would rather have confessed adultery than marriage." 



So much for the Bard's notion of " the Graces." "We find a quota- 

 tion, which we must believe to be a specimen of Skelton. 



' Tliough my rhyme be ragged. 

 Tattered and jagged, 

 Radely rain-beaten. 

 Rusty and moth-eaten. 

 If ye take well therewith 

 It hath in it some pith." 



The power, the strangeness, the volubility of his language,, the intre- 

 pidity of his satire, and the perfect originality of his manner, render 

 Skelton one of the most extraordinary poets of any age or country. 

 Like " Moshes" in the School for Scandal, " we will shwear to it." 

 Extraordinary indeed : barbarous beyond any human pronunciation ; 

 or to be rivalled in that point only by the modern and "much admired" 

 translation of Aristophanes, of whose verses a single page would be of 



