To lull the soul by spurious strokes of art, To warp the genius, and mislead the heart; To make mankind revere wives gone astray,[274] Love pious sons who rob on the highway;[275] For this the foreign muses trod our stage Commanding _German schools_ to be the rage. Hail to such schools! Oh, fine _false feeling_, hail! Thou badst _non-natural nature_ to prevail; Through thee, _soft super-sentiment_ arose, Musk to the mind like civet to the nose; Till fainting taste (as invalids do wrong), Snuff’d the sick perfume, and grew weakly strong. Dear Johnny Bull! you boast much resolution, With, thanks to Heaven! a glorious Constitution: Your taste, recovered half from foreign quacks, Takes airings, now, on English horses’ backs; While every modern bard may raise his name, If not on _lasting praise_, on _stable fame_. Think that to Germans you have given no check, Think how each actor hors’d has risk’d his neck; You’ve shewn them favour: Oh, then, once more shew it To this night’s _Anglo-German, Horse-Play_ Poet!—ED.] [Illustration] No. XXXI. June 11, 1798. We have received, in the course of the last week, several long, and to say the truth, dull letters, from unknown hands, reflecting in very severe terms on MR. HIGGINS, for having, as it is affirmed, attempted to pass upon the world, as a faithful sample of the productions of the German theatre, a performance no way resembling any of those pieces which have so late excited, and which bid fair to engross, the admiration of the British public. As we cannot but consider ourselves as the guardians of MR. HIGGINS’S literary reputation, in respect to every work of his which is conveyed to the world through the medium of our paper (though, what we think of the danger of his principles we have already sufficiently explained for ourselves, and have, we trust, succeeded in putting our readers upon their guard against them)—we hold ourselves bound not only to justify the fidelity of the imitation, but (contrary to our original intention) to give a further specimen of it in our present number, in order to bring the question more fairly to issue between our author and his calumniators.