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Updated: June 8, 2025
There are, of course, certain poetasters now, as always, whose verse is ground out as if by machinery, and who are as little likely to call upon an outside power to aid them as is the horse that treads the cider mill. But among true poets, if the spirit who inspires poesy is a less definitely personified figure than of old, she is no less a sincerely conceived one and reverently worshiped.
This alarmed the poetasters and fiddlers of the town, who were used to deal in a more ordinary kind of ware; and therefore laid down an established rule, which is received as such to this day, "That nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense."
Weep yourselves, if you would have your readers weep, said the shrewd old Roman poet to the shallow poetasters of his Augustan day. And the reproof and the instruction come up from every pew to every pulpit still. 'Feel what you say, if you would have us feel it. Believe what you say, if you would have us believe it. Flee to the refuge yourselves, if you would have us flee.
When, in presence of Augustus, as well as of the high jurors Maecenas, Tibullus, and Virgil, the two poetasters have been heard; when Horace has forgiven Demetrius, and Crispinus, under the sharp effects of the pill, has thrown up, amidst great pain, the disgraceful words which he had used against Horace, he is dismissed by the latter with the admonition to observe, in future, a strict and wholesome diet; to take each morning something of Cato's principles; then taste a piece of Terence and suck his phrase; to shun Plautus and Ennius as meats too harsh for his weak stomach, and to read the best Greeks, 'but not without a tutor.
In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very excellences after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded; naturalness produced by studious art; daring sublimity by strict self-restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than the one now in vogue among poetasters, by honest faith in God....
They are to the full as much mannerists, too, as the poetasters who ring changes on the commonplaces of magazine versification; and all the difference between them is that they borrow their phrases from a different and a scantier gradus ad Parnassum.
There were plenty of Italian poetasters, even in London itself, who could put together a conventional opera-book, but English oratorio was still in the making, and it was not so easy to find a literary framework for it. In any case, it was evident that Italian opera was a precarious enterprise.
Margaret of Scotland, all the world knows already, kissed Alain Chartier's lips in honour of the many virtuous thoughts and golden sayings they had uttered; but it is not so well known that this princess was herself the most industrious of poetasters, that she is supposed to have hastened her death by her literary vigils, and sometimes wrote as many as twelve rondels in the day.
Tibullus, Secundus, Moore, and a thousand other poets and poetasters, have rhymed on the word for centuries, decking it with the choicest and quaintest conceits.
It was stowed away safely in the neighbourhood of Tautesberg and guarded by a group of cattle-farmers, or rather "bush-lancers," as they were afterwards called, in case we should get hold of the proper shells some day or other. In connection with the attack on Helvetia I should like to quote the following lines, written by one of our poetasters, State-Secretary Mr.
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