"We, that are very old!"--May this Excuse the hint you find amiss. My thoughts, I feel, are what to-day Men call _vieux jeu_. Well!--"let them say." The Old, at least, we know: the New (A changing Shape that all pursue!) Has been,--may be, a fraud. --But there! Wind to your sail! _Vogue la galere!_ BRAMSTON'S "MAN OF TASTE" Were you to inquire respectfully of the infallible critic (if such indeed there be!) for the source of the aphorism, "Music has charms to soothe a savage beast," he would probably "down" you contemptuously in the Johnsonian fashion by replying that you had "just enough of learning to misquote";--that the last word was notoriously "breast" and not "beast";--and that the line, as Macaulay's, and every Board School-boy besides must be abundantly aware, is to be found in Congreve's tragedy of _The Mourning Bride_. But he would be wrong; and, in fact, would only be confirming the real author's contention that "Sure, of all blockheads, _Scholars_ are the worst." For, whether connected with Congreve or not, the words are correctly given; and they occur in the Rev. James Bramston's satire, _The Man of Taste_, 1733, running in a couplet as follows:-- Musick has charms to sooth a savage beast, And therefore proper at a Sheriff's feast. Moreover, according to the handbooks, this is not the only passage from a rather obscure original which has held its own. "Without black-velvet-britches, what is man?"--is another (a speculation which might have commended itself to Don Quixote);[4] while _The Art of Politicks_, also by Bramston, contains a third:-- What's not destroy'd by Time's devouring Hand? Where's _Troy_, and where's the _May-Pole_ in the _Strand_? Polonius would perhaps object against a "devouring hand." But the survival of--at least--three fairly current citations from a practically forgotten minor Georgian satirist would certainly seem to warrant a few words upon the writer himself, and his chief performance in verse.