I hate your popular but vulgar authors,
However bright their gifts of genius.
Who turn the sewers of slang into our language,
And thus pollute its sweet and crystal stream.
Our language is a great inheritance ;
Its strength, its beauty and simplicity,
Fit it for every range of human thought,
Enriched with handy words from foreign countries.
The vulgar comic is the popular taste ;
I hate bafibons who travesty plain nature.
And with their wearisome exaggerations.
With low tom-foolery, and with broad grimace,
Burlesque the true simplicity of language.
And give us twaddle, and perverted humour,
For truthful, easy, natural narrative.
Thus is our language lowered and debased,
And the young men of England are corrupted
With an impure unhealthy style of thought.
False wit, low pompousness, and vulgar slang,
The sweepings and the garbage of the kennels.
I hate the morbid taste of modern authors.
Who gloat on Vice just like a surgical operator
Over a pestilent and loathsome corpse,



THE SETTING SUN. 219

Who contemplates the stark revolting spectacle
As a most beautiful subject for dissection
And critical ingenious commentar}-,
Turning it round in half a dozen positions,
And playing with it with his keen-edged knife,
Laying bear all its ghastly mysteries,
And peering into all its foulnesses.
With a calm magnifying microscope,
Regardless of the stench beneath his nostrils.
Some people only like far-fetched ideas.
Deeming of them as others do of doctors,
The further they are brought the better they be.
Some write in riddles to attract attention,
Brimful of learning and obscure allusions.
