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As the conversation began to flag, it was proposed that each should write a verse, and place it, together with two-and-six pence, under the candlestick, the best poet to take the half-crowns, while the unsuccessful rhymers were to settle the bill among them. According to Cunningham, Burns obtained the stakes by writing: "Here am I, Johnny Peep; I saw three sheep, And these three sheep saw me.

A young Irish poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years later, 'You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters; and if all the rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, they would have said the same thing.

Some of the other poems will be mentioned afterwards; meantime we have to consider another crisis in his life some aspects of his nature less pleasing, some episodes in his career dark and unlovely. Speaking of the effect Holy Willie's Prayer had on the kirk-session, he says that they actually held three meetings to see if their holy artillery could be pointed against profane rhymers.

The ranks of the rhymers of the day are thronged with women, among the better of whom is the author of "Edelweiss," who has gathered her occasional verses into a pretty volume under the title of that graceful and tender little poem.

But still 'tis own'd, and is most apparent, there is something also Natural in the Case too, since there are some particular Vessels Nature thinks necessary, to the more exact Composition of this nice thing call'd a Wit, which as they are, or are not Interrupted in the peculiar Offices for which they are appointed, are subject to various Distempers, and more particularly to Effluxions and Vapour, Diliriums Giddiness of the Brain, and Lapsa, or Looseness of the Tongue; and as these Distempers, occasion'd by the exceeding quantity of Volatiles, Nature is obliged to make use of in the Composition, are hardly to be avoided, the Disasters which generally they push the Animal into, are as necessarily consequent to them as Night is to the Setting of the Sun; and these are very many, as disobliging Parents, who have frequently in this Country whipt their Sons for making Verses; and here I could not but reflect how useful a Discipline early Correction must be to a Poet; and how easy the Town had been had N -t, E -w, T. B P -s, D S D -fy, and an Hundred more of the jingling Train of our modern Rhymers, been Whipt young, very young, for Poetasting, they had never perhaps suckt in that Venome of Ribaldry, which all the Satyr of the Age has never been able to scourge out of them to this Day.

These lines, she said, were written by one Vaughn, a Brecknockshire Welsh Doctor of Medicine, who had printed a little book not many years ago. Mr. Richardson said the lines were good, but that he did hold the reading of ballads and the conceits of rhymers a waste of time, to say nothing worse. "The rivers of Babylon, There when we did sit down, Yea, even then we mourned when We remembered Sion.

With infinitely less Attic salt, but with as much heartiness as Aristophanes could have done, the popular rhymers gave the minister ample opportunity to understand the position which he occupied in the Netherlands. One day a petitioner placed a paper in his hand and vanished. It contained some scurrilous verses upon himself, together with a caricature of his person.

"Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill'd from other poems pass away, The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes, Admirers, impostors, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature."

They might be having a green and hearty old age, surrounded by a group of the choicest spirits of all time. Upstairs in the library there are easy-chairs within arm's reach of the best fellows who ever lived adventurers, story-tellers, novelists, explorers, historians, rhymers, fighters, essayists, vagabonds and general liars Immortals, all of them.

We may all be very low Philistines if we are not prepared to accept rhymers for chartered villains; but some of us still have a glimmering of belief in the old standards of nobility and constancy. Can any one fancy Walter Scott cheating a miserable little girl of sixteen into marriage, and then leaving her, only to many a female philosopher?