There is no need that I should tell in words
Your prowess from _The Paradise of Birds_;[58]
No need to show how surely you have traced
The Life in Poetry, the Law in Taste;[59]
Or mark with what unwearied strength you wear
The weight that WARTON found too great to bear.[60]
There Is no need for this or that. My plan
Is less to laud the Matter than the Man.
This is my brief. We recognise in you
The mind judicial, the untroubled view;
The critic who, without pedantic pose,
Takes his firm foothold on the thing he knows;
Who, free alike from passion or pretence,
Holds the good rule of calm and common sense;
And be the subject or perplexed or plain,--
Clear or confusing,--is throughout urbane,
Patient, persuasive, logical, precise,
And only hard to vanity and vice.
More I could add, but brevity is best;--
These are our claims to honour you as Guest.
Notes:
[57] _Alexander Pope: his Safe Return from Troy. A Congratulatory Poem
on his Completing his Translation of Homer's Iliad._ (In _ottava rima_.)
By Mr. Gay, 1720(?). Frere's burlesque, _Monks and Giants_--it will be
remembered--set the tune to Byron's _Beppo_.
[58] _The Paradise of Birds_, 1870.
[59] _Life in Poetry, Law in Taste_, two series of Lectures
delivered in Oxford, 1895-1900.
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