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"Or, yet again, do you suppose her finery was afforded her by Caro? Messer Annibale Caro who is so much in debt that he is never like to return to Piacenza, unless some dolt of a patron rewards him for his poetaster's labours. "No, no, my shaveling. It was I who paid I who was the fool. God! I more than suspected the others. But you. You saint... You!"
Here indeed Southey's unsurpassed biographical skill enforced the poetaster's merit in a charming Memoir, which assisted White's rather pathetic story. He was the son of a butcher, a diligent but reluctant lawyer's clerk, an enthusiastic student, a creditable undergraduate at St. John's, Cambridge, and a victim of consumption. All this made his verse for a time popular.
So to the Cheshire Cheese they repaired, and drank to a long friendship in foaming pewters of porter. "Alas!" said Henry, "we are fallen on smaller times. Once it was 'the poet's pint of port. Now we must be content with the poetaster's half-a-pint of porter!" "You must come to my rooms to-night," said the publisher, "and be introduced to some of our young men.
What, I wonder, would be said if a literary man preferred, say, some eighteenth-century poetaster to Chaucer because the poetaster in his verse observed rules which Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag in Artemus Ward once again, the poetaster's spelling conformed more nearly to ours than Chaucer's! The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously expressive as well.
All which is worth settling you seemed to have settled for yourself before you deigned to consult me. 'I said so? Surely you must mistake. But if any hired poetaster's chant do pass unheeded, what has that to do with Hypatia's eloquence and science, glowing with the treble inspiration of Athene, Phoebus, and Dionusos?
As Apollo saved Horace from hearing a poetaster's rhymes, so did Somnus, another beneficent little deity, rescue our warrior from his daughter's music. She was neither angry nor surprised. A delicious smile illumined her face directly; she crept to him on tiptoe, and bestowed a kiss, light as a zephyr, on his gray head.
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