gone, invited or not invited, to London at the Coronation, lest the Laureat should break down under the compound pressure of solemnity and sack, and the glory slide into oblivion for the want of a fit recorder, it was surely to be hoped that he would have done justice to the royal show in his own country, and in his own city. But, _ecce ridiculus mus!_ the pen which had been so swift, and the tongue which had been so glib at the bidding of a mere plebeian bookseller, were still and mute when a king was the god, and an assembled nation the worshippers. He who had made the world to ring again with the shouts of Highland freebooters, and the din of whose tournaments yet sounds in our ears, failed at the very point of need! “Ah, where was Roderick then! One blast upon _his_ bugle horn” had been worth all the senseless vulgarity from Princes’-street, and all the piddling inanity of Tweedale-court. It was wished for, it was called for, it was imperious upon every principle--not of consistency merely, but of gratitude; but it came not; and all that stands recorded as having come from his otherwise fluent pen upon the occasion, is a paltry and vulgar drinking song, which it would disgrace the most wretched Athenian _caddie_ to troll in the lowest pot-house of the Blackfriars wynd. If one whose piping is so gratefully received and so amply rewarded, and whose loyalty has been withal so abundant and so profitable, remained mute or degenerated into mere foolery upon the occasion, what could be expected from the provincial and unhired dabblers in verse, who write only to the casual inspiration of love or liquor, and melt in madrigals or madden in catches according as Cupid or Bacchus holds the principal sway! Nothing, I maintain, and therefore the Great Unknown is guilty not only of his own omission, but of that of all his countrymen. If he had done as he ought,--done in a way worthy of himself--putting the occasion entirely out of the question, there is not a doubt but the whole drove would have been at his heels. As the case stands, whatever may be the comparative merits of the Whig _becks_ and Tory _booings_, the poetic eclat of the visit of George the Fourth must succumb to that of the descent of Jamie in sixteen hundred and eighteen.