Whether primordial motion sprang to life From the wild war of elemental strife; In central chains the mass inert confined, And sublimated matter into mind: Or, whether one great all-pervading soul Moves in each part and animates the whole; Unnumbered worlds to one great centre draws, And governs all by pre-established laws: Whether in fates’ eternal fetters bound, Mechanic nature goes her endless round: Or ever varying, acts but to fulfil The sovereign mandates of Almighty will;— Let learned folly seek, or foolish pride, Rash in presumptuous ignorance, decide.—ED.] [Eminent as Richard Payne Knight was as a classical scholar and archæologist, his poetical powers were not highly appreciated by his literary contemporaries, as is amusingly shown in a letter from Horace Walpole, dated 22nd March, 1796, to the Rev. W. Mason, in which he declares how much he is “offended and disgusted by Mr. Knight’s new, insolent, and self-conceited poem”. He winds up thus: “I send you a parody on two lines of Mr. Knight, which will show you that his poem is seen in its true light by a young man of allowed parts, MR. CANNING, whom I never saw. The originals are the two first lines at the top of page 5:”— “Some fainter irritations seem to feel, Which o’er its languid fibres gently steal”.—KNIGHT. “Cools the crimp’d cod, to pond-perch pangs imparts, Thrills the shelled shrimps, and opens oysters’ hearts.”—CANNING. It is evident from this that Canning had thought of parodying the poem immediately after its publication, and that Walpole had seen a specimen in manuscript, nearly two years before its publication in the _Anti-Jacobin_, in which the two lines (28, 29) are thus altered:— “Cools the crimpt cod, fierce pangs to perch imparts, Shrinks shrivell’d shrimps, but opens oysters’ hearts”. By an oversight, Peter Cunningham, in his edition of Walpole’s Letters, attributes the latter’s attack to a previous production of Knight’s, published in 1794, entitled _The Landscape: a didactic Poem in three Books_, a work which had excited Walpole’s high indignation by expressing opinions opposed to his own.—ED.] No. XVI. Feb. 26, 1798.