THE POETS AND NATURE. 



PART I. 

 THE POETS' REPTILES. 



CHAPTER I. 

 "REPTILES AND VERMIN. 11 



A REPTILE is not, perhaps, an amiable thing. Its name 

 "that which creeps" prejudices some of us against it. 

 Nor is there anything thoroughly unjustifiable in this. The 

 necessities of speech require a word that shall compendi- 

 ously express the idea of the contemptible and crawling, 

 and at the same time the potentially hurtful. And " reptile " 

 fulfils this obnoxious duty. So when Beattie applies this 

 term of reproach to a servile poet, " the reptile muse, Swoln 

 from the sty, and rankling from the stews," or Byron to 

 a mean critic, they are not to be found fault with. The 

 sycophant in Shelley, the slave in Montgomery, even man 

 " the poor reptile man and heir of woe " himself in loftily- 

 moralising Greene, are metaphorically rendered, and not 

 unfairly, by a term that zoologically implies either a turtle, 

 a crocodile, a frog, a lizard, or a snake. Southey brings 

 some priests under the same category, and scattered up and 

 down in verse will be found scores of individuals whom the 



A 



