A REJECTED POEM 235 



from cattle, not only any amount of deer, but absolutely all and 

 every wild beast of chase." " Conceive," he added, " wild beasts ! 

 even wild beasts in this country." These, if not the exact 

 words, were precisely the burdens of my friend's song ; he having 

 evidently got the idea into his head, that her Majesty and the 

 Prince Consort could, if they pleased at any time so to divert 

 the young princes, and give them such manly recreation, enlarge 

 the contents of the menageries at the Tower lions, tigers, 

 leopards, wolves, hyaenas, elephants, and rhinoceroses among 

 the liege subjects of the New Forest ; and turn it, in fact, into a 

 private zoological or bear garden. All I could say or do was of 

 no use, and the bill passed. Now let us see in what way the 

 poor have been benefited, or who it is that has gone to the wall. 

 I will take my reader a walk in the forest in July 1853. It had 

 been my intention to have published a poem, entitled "The 

 Last of the New Forest Deer," and in that poem there should 

 have been enough of the romantic to have satisfied the fairest 

 bosom full of sighs, and to have excluded the book from any 

 boarding-school presided over by ordinary or unfavoured females, 

 in whose hearts, because unasked for, had grown up the most 

 savage virtue. This poem was nearly finished, but on offering 

 it for sale, I found that my good and former friends, Longman, 

 Colburn, and Bentley, very much against their generous inclina- 

 tion, I am sure, thought of " the devil's walk at break of day," 

 and pluming themselves " like cormorants," were resolved " to 

 sit hard by the tree of knowledge ; " and they told me " poetry 

 was a drug in the present market." In short, I found that with 

 all the advantages boasted by the present enlightened age, the 

 taste for poetry was gone, unless it savoured of hymns, or the to 

 my mind impious rhymings of Mr. Goodfellow, in his terrible 

 attempt to portray the Saviour's childhood, called the " Golden 

 Legend." There are some few things which tell better in poetry 

 than prose, and as I am resolved to cling to my old attachment 

 to the Muses, not because there are nine, as I hear some vindic- 

 tive creature say, but because I love them better than anything 

 else, and have a veneration for Byron and Moore, as well as a 



