‘Hark! ’tis the twanging horn o’er yonder bridge, That with its wearisome but needful length Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon Sees her unwrinkled face reflected bright:— He comes, the herald of a noisy world, With spattered boots, strapped waist, and frozen locks; News from all nations lumbering at his back. True to his charge, the close-packed load behind. Yet careless what he brings, his one concern Is to conduct it to the destined inn; And having dropped the expected bag, pass on. He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch! Cold and yet cheerful; messenger of grief Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some; To him indifferent whether grief or joy. Houses in ashes and the fall of stocks, Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet With tears that trickled down the writer’s cheeks Fast as the periods from his fluent quill, Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains Or nymphs responsive, equally affect His horse and him, unconscious of them all.’ And yet, notwithstanding this, and so many other passages that seem like the very marrow of our being, Lord Byron denies that Cowper was a poet!—The Mail-Coach is an improvement on the Post-Boy; but I fear it will hardly bear so poetical a description. The picturesque and dramatic do not keep pace with the useful and mechanical. The telegraphs that lately communicated the intelligence of the new revolution to all France within a few hours, are a wonderful contrivance; but they are less striking and appalling than the beacon-fires (mentioned by Æschylus), which, lighted from hill-top to hill-top, announced the taking of Troy, and the return of Agamemnon. ON THE SPIRIT OF MONARCHY _The Liberal._] [1822. ‘Strip it of its externals, and what is it but a _jest_?’ _Charade on the word_ MAJESTY. ‘As for politics, I think poets are _Tories_ by nature, supposing them to be by nature poets. The love of an individual person or family, that has worn a crown for many successions, is an inclination greatly adapted to the fanciful tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians, abstract reasoners, of no manner of attachment to persons, at least to the visible part of them, but prodigiously devoted to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally _Whigs_. It happens agreeably enough to this maxim, that the Whigs are friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.’—_Skenstone’s Letters_, 1746.