sant, and snipe shooting, and draws from all the usual moral in defence of field sports, that they harden our "sturdy youth," and educate us for the toils and perils of war.
Pye having been, as he expressed it, "fixed a rhymer for life," he seems to have preferred verse to prose, as the vehicle of his thoughts on any subject in which he might be at the time interested. Thus a theme was suggested by the scenery of his own immediate neighbourhood, and he wrote his poem on Faringdon Hill. "Aeriphorion," another of his poetical lucubrations, was called forth by the Laureate's seeing Mr. Sadler, the first English Aeronaut, ascend in a balloon at Oxford, in 1784. And when he was encamped at Coxheath, in 1778, he translated, in his leisure hours, during the peaceful campaign, the King of Prussia's poem "On the Art of War." We trust that some of the warriors on the plains of Chobham are amusing their philosophic minds after a fashion as intellectual. "This translation," writes Pye, in the Preface, "was the amusement of some of the many leisure hours that necessarily must fall to the lot of every one in a camp not of actual service, though under the command of a general, whose strict attention to the discipline of the regiments entrusted to his care, and whose unremitting diligence in forming the militia corps, will be gratefully remembered by every officer and soldier of that establishment, who wished to acquire a knowledge of the military profession, and not to lounge away a few months in idleness, debauchery, and dissipation." With the same military ardour he afterwards translated the "Elegies" of Tyrtæus, and some of his renderings are very spirited.
It had, however, become so much the joke in literature to laugh at the Laureate, that they did not escape the lash of the author of "Pursuits of Literature," who
