PREFACE TO THE THIRD VOLUME. was THE three satirical Poems with which this Volume commences, were published originally without the author's name ; "Corruption and "Intolerance" in the year 1808, and "The Sceptic" in the year following. The political opinions adopted in the first of these Satires the Poem on Corruption chiefly caught up, as is intimated in the original Preface, from the writings of Bolingbroke, Sir William Wyndham, and other statesmen of that factious period, when the same sort of alliance took place between Toryism and what is now called Radicalism, which is always likely to ensue on the ejection of the Tory party from power.* In this somewhat rash effusion, it will be seen that neither of the two great English parties is handled with much respect; and I remember being taken to task, by one of the few of my Whig acquaintances that ever looked into the poem, for the following allusion to the silencing effects of official station on certain orators: As bees, on flowers alighting, cease their hum, But these attempts of mine in the stately, Juvenalian style of satire, met with but little success, never having attained, I believe, even the honours of a second edition; and I found that lighter form of weapon, to which I afterwards betook myself, not only more easy to wield, but, from its very lightness, perhaps, more sure to reach its mark. * Bolingbroke himself acknowledges that "both parties were become factions, in the strict sense of the word." It would almost seem, too, as if the same unembittered spirit, the same freedom from all real malice with which, in most instances, this sort of squib-warfare has been waged by me, was felt, in some degree, even by those who were themselves the objects of it; SO generously forgiving have I, in most instances, found them. Even the high Personage against whom the earliest and perhaps most successful of my lighter missiles were launched, could refer to and quote them, as I learn from an incident mentioned in the Life of Sir Walter Scott, with a degree of good-humour and playfulness which was creditable alike to his temper and good sense. At a memorable dinner given by the Regent to Sir Walter in the year 1815, Scott, among other stories with which his royal host was much amused, told of a sentence passed by an old friend of his, the Lord Justice Clerk Braxfield, attended by circumstances in which the cruelty of this * Vol. iii. p. 342. |