��Anecdotes.

��Oh! send them to the sullen mansions dun, Her baleful eyes where Sorrow rolls around ; Where gloom-enamour'd Mischief loves to dwell, And Murder, all blood-bolter'd, schemes the wound. When cates luxuriant pile the spacious dish, And purple nectar glads the festive hour; The guest, without a want, without a wish, Can yield no room to Music's soothing pow'r.

Some of the old legendary stories put in verse by modern writers provoked him to caricature x them thus one day at Streatham ; but they are already well-known, I am sure.

The tender infant, meek and mild,

Fell down upon the stone; The nurse took up the squealing child,

But still the child squeal'd on 2 .

A famous ballad also, beginning Rio verde, Rio verde, when I commended the translation of it, he said he could do it better himself as thus :

Glassy water, glassy water, Down whose current clear and strong, Chiefs confus'd in mutual slaughter, Moor and Christian roll along 3 .

��1 Caricature is not in Johnson's Dictionary.

2 Wordsworth says of the imitators of the Reliques, and of Johnson's attack on the old ballads : ' The critic triumphed, the legendary imi tators were deservedly disregarded, and as undeservedly, their ill-imitated models sank in this country into temporary neglect ... Dr. Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labours . . . that, though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true sim- p.icity and genuine pathos . . . yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of the Hermit of Warkworth, a diction scarcely in any one of its features distinguishable from the vague, the

��glossy, and unfeeling language of his day.' Wordsworth's Works, ed. 1857, vi. 372.

Percy himself described his Re- liques as ' such a strange collection of trash.' Nichols's Literary History, vii. 577.

Johnson had helped Percy in the publication of the Reliques. Life, iii. 276, n. 2 ; Letters, i. 89. 3 ' Rio verde, rio verde,

Quanto cuerpo en ti se bana De Cristianos y de Moros

Muertos por la dura espada.'

• Gentle river, gentle river,

Lo, thy streams are stain 'd

with gore !

Many a brave and noble captain Floats along thy willow'd

shore.'

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, vol. i. Bk. iii. No. 16.

But

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