COME, join me, British landsmen, dragoons and grenadiers, The mighty cannon roar'd alone, and sailors won the day. 2. 'Twas in the morning early, the north wind bore us down, Our van of floating batteries the noble Pellew led, And bravely dropp'd his anchor a-breast of the Mole-head. 3. "Now yield thee, prince of pirates, and terror of the sea, 4. The city rose above us as white as mountain snow, 5. The summer sun was westering as the work of death begun ; It sunk in cloud and darkness before the fray was done. Then ye heard the crash of bulwarks that tumbled from their height, And blazing barks dismasted came wildly drifting nigh, And, midst the pause of thunder, ye heard the heathen cry. 6. "Now hold thee, gallant admiral, I bow to God's decree ; Renounce my plundered treasures, and set the captive free." "Now shout, my lads," quoth brave Pellew, "now shout for victory." VOL. VII. 20 DEAR NORTH, HORE CANTABRIGIENSES. No V. I TRUST I am not taking an unpardonable liberty in sending you, for your Hora Cantabrigienses, my versions of an ode or two of Horace, as a specimen of some thirty or forty which I have lately endeavoured to exhibit in octosyllabic verse. I trust, at least, you will give the translator credit for that first virtue of a translator, fidelity. To elegance of any kind, still more to Horace's elegance, I fear I have slight pretension. Yours ever, X. BOOK FIRST, ODE NINTH. SEE'ST thou, my friend, how white with snow, Towers in mid air Soracte's brow; How with their load the forests bend, BOOK FIRST, ODE THIRTY-EIGHTH, BOOK FOURTH, ODE SECOND. He who to Pindar's heights would soar, Around his brow be wreathed the bay, He roll, in fierce poetic heat, Where mingle numbers wild and sweet; Or round the victor's palm-crown'd head, His golden truth, his matchless might, I, like the toiling matin bee, (Whose wing o'er many a thyme-bed roves, But thou, my friend, in bolder verse, Nor e'er shall give, though backward roll'd, And grateful games, and truce-closed war, Then, too, if aught of power be mine, For thee ten bulls, ten udder'd cows Such as the third night's Cynthia wears, Boriana; or, Sketches of Pugilism. BY ONE OF THE FANCY. No VII. We knew and loved the late Peter Corcoran well-and had ourselves intended to have given his Remains to the world, but justice has been done him by another editor, who enjoyed and deserved the friendship of that poetical pugilist. We cannot too much applaud the delicacy with which he has discharged this melancholy duty to his chum. He has violated no private confidence-he has kindled no animosities-he has promulgated no pernicious doctrines. They who read the memoirs of Peter Corcoran to indulge a passion for scandal, will soon shut the volume in disappointment they who dip into his works from the love of vice, will, if they read attentively, carry away with them an abhorrence of its seductions and a pity for its miseries. The poet, the pugilist, and the philosopher, will find in this little volume, food for the reason, the imagination, and the fancy. Indeed, we do not scruple to say, that this prefatory memoir is one of the best pieces of biography that have appeared during this age. The lives of Chatterton, Burns, Dermody, Kirk White, and others, are vastly inferior in interest and instruction to that of Peter Corcoran. The case of Chatterton, "the Bristol boy, who perished in his pride," is anomalous, and therefore useless. There is little chance of any other young man coming to an untimely end by the forgery of old poems. Burns, too, had a destiny from which no moral can be well drawn, generally applicable to poetical ploughmen. He loved whisky-and his patrons made him an Exciseman. Poor Dermody, whom the Edinburgh Reviewer feelingly called, "Dermody the drunkard," died of hope, despair, poverty, passion, hunger, and thirst-a stranger in a foreign land-and no doubt, a moral might be drawn from The Fancy; a selection Gray's Inn, student at Law. Taylor and Hessey. 1820. his destiny. Kirk White died of the mathematics. The D. J. O. of Peter Corcoran, gives a lesson to the age, which, we hope, the age will read and profit by-he perished by pugilismnot the practice, but the passion of the art. Curtis + and Corcoran are, each in his respective way, the martyrs of the ring. 66 Peter Corcoran was born in September 1794, at Shrewsbury, a town," says the editor, "not very celebrated for men either of talent or genius, but proverbial for the pride and arrogance of its inhabitants, and the excellence of its cakes." His parents were Irish, but left Carlow soon after their marriage. The editor has neglected to assure the world of what we know to be a fact, that Mrs Corcoran was pregnant before she left Carlow-indeed farther advanced than the thoughtless reader might conjecture—so that Peter was merely born in Shropshire. During his boyhood, he licked the best lads all round the Wrekin-and it will be some time before the familiar appellation of Young Corky will be forgotten by the Severn's side. At Oxford he made a considerable figure, having thrashed a proctor, and been pluckedan operation on which he ever afterwards felt extremely sore. One of the best battles, perhaps, he ever fought, was with a big blouzy bachelor of Brazenose, in Port-Meadow, who tauntingly had shook his sleeves at Peter, and complimented him on having shewn pluck in the schools. Peter, who was a first class man in his way, took the fight out of A. B. in the twinkling of a bed-post, and walked back to Corpus, robed in his antagonists bachelor's gown, to the great delight of that nation. Leaving Oxford without a degree, (after all, where is the use of one to an Irishman in London ?) young Corcoran from the poetical remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of With a brief memoir of his Life. London: Printed for Killed in battle by left-handed Ned. entered himself of Gray's Inn, and took lodgings in Vine Street, Piccadilly, to be near a pretty girl (his designs were honourable) with whom he had become acquainted during a run up from Oxford to Town. "It may be supposed," quoth the editor neatly," that he looked more into her face than into the Lord Chancellors; and that he turned the curls on her forehead oftener than the leaves of Coke." He now fell into poetry," and flamed in the gorgeous pages of La Belle assemblée, or pined in the sober and pensive volumes of the Gentleman's. The Magazines felt the ardour or the melancholy of his hand, month after month!" The following is a specimen of the effusions of his muse at this period-and we conceive that there could be nothing particularly disagreeable in hearing it sung to a good air. STANZAS. Hark! Italy's music Melts over the sea; Falling light from some lattice, Where cavaliers be: And sweet lady voices Steal over the deep, To hush all around us The billows to sleep. Our gondola gently Goes over the wave: As though it were dreaming To sounds that enslave :We listen-we listen! How blessed are we, Who hear this dim music O'er Italy's sea! Unfortunately at this period the young lady whom Peter loved went down into Kent, on a visit to her maternal uncle, an immense Hop Merchant; and Peter, after ineffectual efforts to fan his constancy by love letters, "was driven, by the natural enthusiasm of his mind, to seek in other pursuits new pleasures, not that his love decreased, but from inaction it slept." It was a critical time with Corcoran. His evil genius met him one drizzly day in August 1817, (Tuesday 19th,) in a shape not at all to be suspected, namely, that of an old Oxford acquaintance, dressed in a blue surtout and white trowsers, and wiled him away into the Fives Court, to witness a sparring exhibition. It was for the benefit of Randal, and the nonpareil's first appeal to the patronage of the public. This was the most important day in young Corcoran's life, and thenceforth he devoted all the exertions of his mind and body to the science of pugilism. He passed evening after evening at Belcher's house, Castle Tavern, (you see Tom, we have not forgotten you, compliments to Mrs Belcher), and can we praise him more, than to say that he was the friend of Egan? Would that he had confined himself to such harmless and amusing company! Would that nothing darker had overshadowed his destiny, than the clouds blown over him by the historian of the British Ring. But "thin partitions" do in London divide houses of very different kinds of entertainment, and Peter Corcoran too soon made a wreck, no, not of his honour, but assuredly of his health and happiness. Even in sparring with the gloves, it was but too visible to his friends, that he gave the return with diminished rapidity, that his guard was wavering, and that his confidence was gone. The day had been when he had not the worst of it, even with Eales, when he had stopped Scroggin's rush, and parried "the ravaging hand of Randal.” But second-raters nobbed him now; and his wind was so treacherous, that after a couple of rounds, he was at the mercy even of a Johnny Raw! At this dark period, his poetical seems to have faded with his pugilistic powers." His muse abandoned all hopes of achieving any thing great or good, and it was with this feeling that he wrote the following sonnets.' |