Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The next on the list is the Siddons—great name!
Of Britain at once—the delight and the shame!
She lay like a gem on the bed of old Ocean,
'Till Chance and Caprice call'd her soul into motion.

When Virtue exalted groans under oppression;
The turn of her eye gives a strength to expression;
Or poor Isabella, worn out with her woes,
And Misery goaded, looks up for repose
To her Biron's enraged, and unnatural sire,
We all feel her pangs, and acknowledge her fire;

The tale of her sorrows is ably imprest,
And the heroine's wrongs fill the void of each breast:
All the force of Illusion attends on her will,
And the tears that gush forth—prove the test of her skill.
Our pulses flow faint, as the ear drinks her sigh,
And Horror and Savageness glare in her eye.

Her greatness is such that all classes adore it,
Like Africa's whirlwinds, it sweeps all before it:
Nor Cibber, nor Pritchard, nor Crawford, nor Yates,
Or the tribes of which theatric history prates,
Could step with a chance of success in her place,
Or put on the buskin with half so much grace;
She touches the boundaries of all we desire;
Her silence has sense, and her action has fire;

With a sacred lust she assays to be glorious,
And the fiat of Fame proves the effort victorious;
Like the heroes of Homer, her faculties shine,
Of whom half was human, the other divine.

Tho' I paint thus impassion'd her elegant picture,
The model has failings which merit a stricture!
She wants the fine taste of the great Algarotti,
To soften the wildness of fam'd Bonarotti;
Like th' eminent Michael, she scorns to be bland,
Her dashes are strokes; tho' unnatural, grand!

She pants that the Genius of Glory may find her,
But oft, in her haste, leaves—poor Reason behind her.

Thalia, too sportive to dwell in a tomb,
Long since fled her fancy, appall'd by its gloom;
As sable Melpomene watch'd at her birth,
And moulded her features repulsive to Mirth;
The dimples of Pleasure must Siddons resign;
Who's wedded cold Horror, and bow'd at her shrine:
For tho', with vast labour, she forces a smile,
'Tis a sickly exotic, unknown to the soil.

Yet, wond'rous! there are, whose egregious zeal,
Pervert what they see, and defeat what they feel;
They tell us her Lovemore's the type of perfection,
Unsham'd by the clamour of public detection.
—'Tis the lie of the day, a mere falshood diurnal,
Which Fame will, indignant, erase from her journal!
Like a Will-o'-th'-Wisp, they go forth to betray,
And lead simple Nature far out of the way;
'Till fatigu'd and bemir'd, she struggles for light,
And Truth clears the mist which had clouded her sight.

But hapless is he, who, to Folly a minion,
Will yield up his senses to take her opinion:
'Tis fretting the mind her caprice to obey,
When the merit of yesterday's doubted to-day;
For those men whom our sires have lauded, with pride
Their sons have assail'd, and defil'd, and decry'd:
And the mind's poor infirmities dash'd from their throne,
Forgetting the weakness that lives in their own.

—E'en Hayley weaves verse in Antipathy's loom,
To murder the guardians of Warburton's Tomb!
He wounds, unabash'd, the repose of the dead,
And the laurel, once sacred, demands from the head;
As Prejudice, like a vile gypsy sits jaded,
Untwisting that texture which Honor had braided.

But Folly's wild impulse has delug'd the nation,
And o'er-run the land, like a foul inundation;
In her vanity firm the nymph blunders along,
Tho' prov'd to be nine times in ten in the wrong;
And who but laments such a Minx has the power
To consecrate Fashion, tho' but for an hour.

Her Rosalind was—(but, alas! who'd suppose,
That Judgment and Siddons were ever such foes?)
A tragical, comical, farcical creature,
The offspring of Pride, and the alien of Nature!
Such hoarse awful accents were never design'd
To lighten those cares which obtrude on the mind:
As Fate a creator like Shakespeare would send us,
From such a vile martyrdom, Heaven defend us!
She oft fills in thought a vast compass of action,
When her fame's but expanded by false rarefaction.
If Flattery lies in some gross attestation,
Bid her shut up her ears from the foul adulation,
As she suffers the witch (to Deformity blind)
To abridge by vile spells her great powers of mind:

Like a sorceress dire her charms she dispenses,
Encircles her progress, and birdlimes her senses.
Base nymph, tho' she courts with a passion rapacious,
Her praise is disease, and her smiles are fallacious.

It is piteous that Avarice e'er should deform
A mind to the sorrows of fiction so warm:
It sullies the face of her high reputation,
As frost nips the buddings of young vegetation;
Her genius it sicklies, her faculties seizes,
It warps the affections, and amity freezes.
Like the winds at New Zembla, its icy-fraught dart,
Shuts up every passage that leads to the heart.
It wars with the passions which rage in her breast,
And, like the Greek tyrant, subdues all the rest!