 | The Works of Thomas Love Peacock |  |
IV. [CHEVY CHASE]
As blue as Neptune's self;
And cursed the jade, his skull that threw
Upon the coral shelf;
That scraping Proteus sung,
Which forced his mare to rear amain,
And got her rider flung.
He strove in vain to clear;
For still the ruthless fiddlestick
Was shrieking at his ear,
So comically sad,
That oft he strove in vain to speak,
He felt so wondrous mad.
He deemed the case no joke,
In spite of all the diz and whiz,
Like parish-clerk he spoke
As long as Chevy Chase,
Which made Sir Proteus raise his chime,
While Glaucus fled the place.
So little did redoubt,
And when the brain was out;
That twirled when winds did puff,
And forced Old Scratch to ply his heels,
By dint of usage rough.
Grim Neptune bade him stop the peals
Of such infernal stuff.
To silence Johnny Raw:
For Nereid's grin, or Triton's fin,
He did not care a straw;
So still did spin his rhyming din,
Without one hum or haw,
Though still the crazy violin
Kept screaming: “Hoot awa'!”
And fled, in rout inglorious,
With all the Nereids, from the spell
Of Johnny's stave laborious,
And Neptune scouted in his shell,
And left stout Raw victorious.
Blue, darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,
In all its rich variety of tints,
Suffused with glowing gold.
Southey's Madoc.
This would be no ill compliment to the author last cited, a professed admirer and imitator of Sternhold and Hopkins.
There is a gentleman in this condition in Mr. Southey's Curse of Kehama, who is nevertheless perfectly alive and vigorous, makes two or three attempts to ravish a young lady, and is invariably repelled by a very severe fustigation. The times have been, that when the brain was out the man would die; but, with so many living contradictions of this proposition, we can scarcely rank the dead-alive Arvalan among the most monstrous fictions of Hindoo mythology; whatever we may think of the spinning-wheel arms of Kehama, who contrives to split himself into eight pieces, for the convenience of beating eight devils at once: for which profane amusement he is turned to a red-hot coal. Voilà la belle imagination!
| The Works of Thomas Love Peacock | |