LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
259 
But- none by sabre or by shot, 
Fell half so flat as Walter Scott. 
* 
We have considered ourselves entitled to enter into the fore¬ 
going 1 digression, for the purpose of introducing a new character, 
amongst the many extraordinary ones which have already figured 
in these pages, and that personage is no other than the Poet 
Laureat of the Victory. 
We know that it is customary before a debutant makes his 
appearance on the stage, to keep the spectators for some minutes 
in a state of suspense, in order that their curiosity and anxiety 
may be wound up to the highest pitch, in anticipation of the 
phenomenon that is forthcoming, and we see no reason why the 
same method should not be adopted in the introduction of so im¬ 
portant a personage as a poet, in the very nucleus of the Arctic 
Regions, sending forth the effusions of his prolific imagination, 
amidst such ardent and inspiring objects as the superlative beauty 
of the Esquimaux women, the exquisite flavor of whale’s blubber, 
the sublimity of an iceberg, the grandeur of a snow storm, the 
freezing of mercury, the incalculable advantages of a steam 
engine in the middle of a floe of ice, and though last not least, 
of Capt. Ross himself. 
With that modesty however which is inseparable from true 
merit, we are requested to withhold the name of this great 
aspirant for poetic fame, but one thing may be relied upon, 
which is, that it was not Capt. Ross himself, for it w T ould be 
unjust to suppose that a genius of his transcendant powers, who, 
with his deep sea clamm had raised the mud of the ocean, and 
which but for him would perhaps never have been raised at all, 
could descend to such an ignoble occupation as that of tagging 
rhymes, and inditing pastorals in a country where a Corydon 
and Phyllis with their crook and lambkins would be two charact¬ 
ers as rare to be found, as Punch and Judy in a Methodist’s 
chapel. That the following effusion by the inspired poet of 
the Victory, will be copied into every Annual and Magazine, 
particularly the Evangelical and the Methodist’s, but not into 
