Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/325

verted upon again in "Parnassus in Pillory. A satire. By Motley Manners, Esquire. New York, 1851." The anonymous bard bemoaned the sad plight of his own country:

Oh, hapless land of mine! whose country-presses
Labor with poets and with poetesses;
Where Helicon is quaffed like beer at table,
And Pegasus is "hitched" in every stable;
Where each smart dunce presumes to print a journal,
And every journalist is dubbed a "colonel";
Where lovesick girls on chalk and water thrive,
And prove, by singing, they're unfit to wive;
Where Gray might Miltons by the score compute—
"Inglorious" all, but, ah! by no means "mute."

And there is sense as well as vigor in his denunciation of that colonial attitude of so many Americans in the days before the civil war had made us somewhat less self-conscious:

The British critics—be it to their glory,
When they abuse us, do it con amore;
There's no half-way about your bulldog pure,
And there's no nonsense with your "Scotch reviewer."
Heaven knows how often we've been whipped like curs,
By those to whom we've knelt as Worshippers;
Heaven only knows how oft, like froward chitlings,
Our authors have been snubbed by British witlings;
Our mountains ranked as mole-hills—our immense
And awful forests styled "Virginny fence";
Our virtues all but damned with faintest praise,
And our faults blazoned to the widest gaze!
I find no fault with them—they praise us rarely;
As for abuse—we're open to it fairly;
But faith, it galls me, and I'll not deny it,
To mark our own most deferential quiet;
To note the whining, deprecative air
With which we beg for praise, or censure bear;
Shrink back in terror if our gifts they spurn,
And if they smite one cheek, the other turn;—
Begging that they'll excuse a patient dunce,
Who, if he could, would offer both at once.

Perhaps as good as any of the portraits in Parnassus in Pillory is this of Lowell:

O, Lowell! now sententious—now most wordy—
Thy harp Cremona half—half hurdy-gurdy;
Wouldst thou arise, and climb the steeps of heaven?
Sandals and staff are for thy journey given;
Wouldst thou embrace the poet-preacher's lot?
Nor purse nor scrip will lift thy steps a jot!
Forth on the highways of the general mind,
Thy soul must walk, in oneness with mankind.
Thou hast done well, but thou canst yet do better,
And winning credit, make the world thy debtor;
Pour out thy heart—albeit with flaws and fractures:
Give us thyself—no "Lowell manufactures."

The past fifty years have not called forth another formal satire of contemporary literature, although the need is as acute now as it ever was, and although the public relish for ill-natured remarks is as keen as ever. Probably one reason why the longer satire in verse does not make its appearance is because the immense multiplication of periodicals, weekly and monthly, affords to the intending satirist a chance to shoot his shafts one by one in the papers without having to save them up for discharge in a volley and in a volume. Thus it was that the late H. C. Bunner—a cordial lover of poetry, with a trained craftsman's appreciation of technic, a keen sense of humor, and a singular gift of parody—put forth his satires week by week in the paper he had conducted to prosperity.