THE CORONATION; A Poem, in Six Cantos. It was impossible to resist sending to our booksellers for a poem professing to treat of the late most glorious Coronation. Its subject had often engrossed our own editorial circle; and as a public thenie for the rival poets of the empire, none could surpass it. We would ourselves subscribe ten guineas, to set going a national reward for the three best poems on the subject to embrace the History of Coronation; the antiquity of its vestments, ceremonies, and customs; a review of the Coronations of the Kings of England; and of that of "King George the Fourth in particular." In the title of the prose-run-mad performance before us, we are told, in capital letters, that "the author's name will appear in the next edition"-a circumstance which we very much doubt, unless the mere title should attract silly purchasers like ourselves. In the Preface we are also threatened, that if this six Canto thing should be approved, an "But little the quiet to any ear "But little the quiet to any ear of that night, or the sleep to any eye. Expectance filled each mind with waking dreams; and wheels were rolling, and lights were passing, and cheeks that should have been on soft pillows laying, were reflected in deep mirrors, where locks were braiding, and gems arranging, and plumes were waving for the coming day. And it came: and full bright was the rising of the sun that morn, but brighter the scene his broad eye looked upon. He (the sun) had been wak'd by the roar of the cannon." Ye poets of England! Ireland and Scotland! Druids of Wales! are ye not ashamed that a man who does not know his own language, or even common grammar, should wake the sun by the roar of his cannon, whilst ye are all asleep!! and dare, with less than Grub-street skill, snatch such a theme from your inspirations? OH! FIE! A PROPHECY. To the Editor of the Country Constitutional Guardian. SIR,-I found the other day on a blank page in Stow's Chronicles the following Prophecy, dated June 7, 1770, which day I find by the Peerage gave birth to our noble Premier, the present Earl of Liverpool, who married a daughter of the Earl of Bristol, Recent events have afforded so striking an accomplishment, that I am tempted to offer it for insertion in your loyal Magazine. There seem to be many other pieces of this kind scattered pretty profusely throughout the book, but written in a very illegible hand, which at present I have not time to decypher. Should I discover any thing curious and worthy the observation of your readers, I will hereafter with much pleasure communicate it. Ozford, Nov. 8, 1821. I am, Sir, Yours, with best wishes, When Liverpool and Bristol shall be one, Then France shall borrow light from England's sun, But when that loving bond be broke in twain, J. B. Advice to H. Hunt, Esq, on the Joy expressed by him for the removal of "He's gone! (cries Hunt, as bold as Hector,). "The girls shall quaff my breakfast Nectar, NESTOR. ITALY, BY LADY MORGAN, THE observation of Pliny the elder, that no book is so bad but that some good may be extracted from it, though often quoted, must lose its application in these free-publishing and free-thinking times. The radi cal press teems with the most scandalous productions, vicious in taste, morals, politics, and religion, at once profligate, seditious, and blasphemous: that much of all this is to be found in the work before us, it may not be difficult to shew, and it is no small outrage upon society, that a woman is its author. The art and mystery of book-making has seldom presented us with a more tiresome and disgusting work; historians, party-writers, and tourists, ancient and modern, have all been laid under contribution to make up two quarto volumes. The great mass of the work is but the pouring out of one vial into another, nor is it improved by the transfer: Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis acescit.-HOR *. Whatever the most venomous spite could dictate is interspersed to spin out more than eight hundred closely printed pages, with the very laudable intent of doing as much mischief as might produce a large sum of money for the present, and constitute Sir Charles and Lady Morgan literary patentee retailers of evil for future years. Whatever may be the immediate matter of discussion, the burden is sure to be inveterate hatred to both Church and King; it is like the eternal and inevitable Au with which Eschylus stops the mouth of his rival Euripides in the witty frogs of Aristophanes. It reminds us of Godwin's perpetual recurrence to the same tiresome diabolical feelings, without his ingenuity in varying the expressions. The inquisition or the conversazione lead to the same point; every thing affords an opportunity to display gross malice, gross ignorance, extreme vulgarity, and the grossest vanity. The human idol of Lady Morgan's soul (next to Sir Charles) is Buonaparte; the high priest of her devotion (the reader could never guess) Pythagoras. Vide page 395, vol. ii. and note. It is time, however, to present the reader with. some extracts from the work itself, to shew that we at least set down nought in malice. Speaking of what ......The filthy jar, Turns sweetest wine to vinegar. is termed the road of Buonaparte' over the Alps, she says, "All that had been danger, difficulty, and suffering but twenty years back, was now safe, facile, and enjoyable ; secure beyond the chance of acci dent, sublime beyond the reach of thought. Legitimate princes! divine-righted sovereigns! houses of France, Austria, and Savoy, which of you have done this?' There is not one among you, descendants of a Clovis, a Barbarossa, or an Amadeus, but may in safe conscience shake his innocent head and answer, Thou canst not say 'twas I did it!' Neither does the world accuse you!" They would indeed have been fools if they had; why must Buonaparte be ever praised for making a road to carry his own troops into Italy, one would think he had himself gone manfully to work with a pick-axe and spade, and done the whole thing propriis manibus, as the devil built his bridges in one night. He did but order it to be done, an Italian was the engineer, and Italian money paid for it: the sole object was French aggression and tyranny. In the next page she manufactures for him this pretty compliment in Scripture phraseology, "Who grappled with obstacles coeval with creation, levelled the pinnacle, blew up the rock, pierced the granite, and spanned the torrent, disputing with nature in all her potency her right to separate man from man, and made straight in the desert an highway for progressive civilization." She likewise tells us of his " reaching the gates of Paradise by earthly causeways," in which he will be perhaps jostled by Mr. Alderman Wn. In the catalogue of things under radical anathema, there is nothing so utterly odious to Lady Morgan as legitimacy. Legitimate is the su perlative epithet to all that is monstrous. Vile kings and the devil, are called by her, old legitimates. The poor King of Sardinia (so very wittily likewise named the King of Anchovies) and his " legitimate the double barrelled gun. Thus wig" are held in the greatest abhorrence. Royal taste is legitimate vertů, kings in general anti-intellectual legitimates-legitimate robbers are opposed to illegitimate plun. derers, the latter the French by way of compliment; and legitimate crusaders rise up against illegitimate despotism. Yet she dignifies by mistake, of course, the object of her greatest hatred, the Emperor of Austria, with the title of " illegiti mate," "the bastard Barbarossa of the day." We do not presume to inquire into Lady Morgan's family history to account for this illegitimate hatred of legitimacy, but it brings strangely into our recollection Una Certa Morgana, spoken of by Ariosto, who hated the only legitimate daughter of her father. Che'l padre già lasciò del tutto crede; Perchè sola legitima avea quella. Behold! then, her first entrance into Italy, in chap, 3. "The traveller who ascends from Lans-le-bourg, shivering with cold, and shuddering with apprehension, descends into the town of Susa, glowing under the rays of summer suns"-query, how many? Thus she is at once metamorphosed into another Pentheus, who we are told in the frenzy of curiosity saw two suns, two Thebes, and was kept coutinually running forward and back ward with perpetual unrest. Pentheus amaz'd, doth troops of furies spy; And Sun and Thebes seem double to his eye. Lady Morgan is determined not to be outdone by Pentheus, for she likewise sees leaning towers at Bologna, whereas there is but one there; she is fond of pluralities. Thus double-sighted Sir Charles and Lady Morgan descend from the Alps to scour the plains of Italy in quest of game, like that phenome. non of natural history the doublenosed pointer, so great an acquisition to keen sportsmen, and for which great invention of nature the wit of man has furnished them with these two, yet one, Sir Charles and Lady Morgan for Sir Charles"Segue Morgana, qual fiera il levriero" commence their sporting season; yet with this idea, we cannot say we envy them their career, for in Italy we can assure our readers, from our own knowledge, it is no light matter to go with one's nose to the ground, and no peculiar benefit to be so double gifted. Whilst we are in good humour we will venture to give a specimen or two of her style of fine writing, before we come to more serious matter, and we will venture to advise her not to affect new words, or words in a new sense. What stuff to talk of "caducity, phasis, impulsion," and these not accidentally or occasionally introduced, but thrust forward wherever she can use them, with a perpetual interlarding of unnecessary French out of sheer vile taste. We confess ourselves too innocent or too simple to understand what she means, page 91, vol. ii. by "getting to the topography of love," and prating" of its whereabouts," "familiar facts," "place where and time when," and giving every feast and fast in love's calendar, a local habitation and a name," and this she terms "authenticating a passion." Davus sum non Edipus. She affects peculiar sublimity in describing the Coliseum. "We have seen it in the deep shadows of moonless nights, when not "A star twinkled through the loops of time, and when its black colossal mass was dimly marked upon the vague of space, all then was dreary, and still, and formless; or if a sound was heard, it added to the awfulness of the moment. Once as we stood, a bird of prey, flitting from its topmost arch, brushed down ed down the huge loose stones, which had stood the brunt of ages; the echoes of the fall from gallery to gallery startled the slumbers of the galley slave who slept beneath. He rattled his chains, and roused the centinel at his post, who thought of murdered martyrs, shouldered his arms, drew the sign of the cross, and muttered a protecting ave, &c. &c." Now mark how a "" plain tale" will set her down; this is the way descriptions are got up, and books manufactured: in vulgar England, aye, and Italy too, nights that are both moonless and starless are as black as one's hat (if it be not a radical) and there is nothing at all discernible upon this her nonsensical "vague of space;" yet in this pitchblack night she distinguishes a bird of prey from a crow or a magpie, and sees him, though she could not see her own hand, brush down with a feather huge stones that had stood the brunt of ages: the dramatic effect of the galley slave and centinel is quite in the melo-dramico, tragico-comico of the day: the rattling of the chains is particularly happy as a hint at the tyranny of kings; but lest we should be terrified out of our wits, she presently recollects the usual theatrical expedients, and (note the good taste of the thing) brings into our relief the regular ballet, with the twinkling footed dancers whom for public information she assures us particularly are no Vestals!! All this in the Coliseum!!! We must really be excused for recurring once more to La fata Morgana, in old Boyardo. Trovò Morgana, ch'intorno alla soglia We are willing to believe her ladyship does not understand the indecent wit of "Avete fallo la Pasqua," though she emphatically tells us, it is the whisper of an arch wag ou seeing the unusual sight of the sposo con sposa. In page 108, vol. i. we have a most admirable politico-radical dance, where the nobles, gentry, manufacturers, and peasantry all mingling and dancing promiscuously with the children of all ranks, made a very animated part of this national ballet. Then came French quadrilles, English country dances and waltzes, all punctually executed as to the figure and with an à plomb that made amends for the absence of more airy graces." It is rather aristocratic, however, that only the "higher class of visitants" came in for the refreshments, "wines of all sorts, chesnuts, and sweet cakes, ices, lemonades, sweetmeats, &c.” Now this being just the sort of thing she would wish to introduce in this country, we cannot but fancy we behold the Lords Grey and Grosvenor executing punctually a figure with an à plomb with Hunt's Mrs. V and Mrs. Carlile, Mr. Alderman W▬▬▬▬▬▬▬n, with the Princess Olive of Cumberland, and the airy graces of Lady Morgan coquetting with little Waddington and the Black Dwarf. These are the radical spectacles reserved for us. In page 183, vol. ii. she affords the disconsolate whigs great comfort, and mentions a fact to their great honour, perhaps not generally known in England: we will therefore give it in her own words." And the Pantheon successively dedicated to all the gods! and all the saints! by Roman patricians and Roman pontiffs, is now dedicated to All the Talents! ! !” At the end of the first volume, to fill up, and we presume likewise to supply the place of a puff-advertisement of Sir Charles in Arte Obstetricâ, the public is favoured with about forty pages on medicine, wherein Sir Charles, like another. medical Apollo, gallops in his "clistering coach" through all the. signs of the anatòmical zodiac so. mystically versified by Francis Moore, physician, in his learned almanack. To the terror of all married ladies, he, Sir Charles, tells us" Among the lusus naturæ were a Cyclops, or rather triocular mon. ster," though a Cyclops by the bye, has, or had in the time of Polyphemus, but one eye. But the wonder of all wonders is the story of some one or other being brought to bed of a "hind quarter of lamb, ready for the spit, excepting that it was alive!!" Now should any nervous |