13 Alas! how joyless the descriptive theme, When sorrow on the writer's quiet preys; And like a mouse in Cheshire cheese supreme, Devours the substance of the lessening bays. 14 Come, February, lend thy darkest sky, There teach the wintered muse with clouds to soar: Come, February, lift the number high; Let the sharp strain like wind through alleys roar. 15 Ye channels, wandering through the spacious street, In hollow murmurs roll the dirt along, With inundations wet the sabled feet, Whilst gouts, responsive, join the elegiac song. 16 Ye damsels fair, whose silver voices shrill Sound through meandering folds of Echo's horn; Let the sweet cry of liberty be still, No more let smoking cakes awake the morn. 17 O Winter! put away thy snowy pride; O Spring! neglect the cowslip and the bell; O Summer! throw thy pears and plums aside; O Autumn! bid the grape with poison swell. 18 The pensioned muse of Johnson is no more! Drowned in a butt of wine his genius lies. Earth! Ocean! Heaven! the wondrous loss deplore, The dregs of nature with her glory dies. 19 What iron Stoic can suppress the tear! What sour reviewer read with vacant eye! What bard but decks his literary bier!-- Alas! I cannot sing--I howl--I cry! LORD LYTTELTON. Dr Johnson said once of Chesterfield, 'I thought him a lord among wits, but I find him to be only a wit among lords.' And so we may say of Lord Lyttelton, 'He is a poet among lords, if not a lord among poets.' He was the son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, of Hagley in Worcestershire, and was born in 1709. He went to Eton and Oxford, where he distinguished himself. Having gone the usual grand tour, he entered Parliament, and became an opponent of Sir Robert Walpole. He was made secretary to the Prince of Wales, and was in this capacity useful to Mallett and Thomson. In 1741, he married Lucy Fortescue, of Devonshire, who died five years afterwards. Lyttelton grieved sincerely for her, and wrote his affecting 'Monody' on the subject. When his party triumphed, he was created a Lord of the Treasury, and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a peerage. He employed much of his leisure in literary composition, writing a good little book on the Conversion of St Paul, a laboured History of Henry II., and some verses, including the stanza in the 'Castle of Indolence' describing Thomson-- 'A bard there dwelt, more fat than bard beseems,' &c.-- and a very spirited prologue to Thomson's 'Coriolanus,' which was written after that author's death, and says of him, --'His chaste muse employed her heaven-taught lyre None but the noblest passions to inspire: Not one immoral, one corrupted thought, _One line which, dying he could wish to blot_.'