But chief avoid the boisterous roaring sparks, The sons of fire!—you’ll know them by their marks. Fond to be heard, they always court a crowd, And, though ’tis borrow’d nonsense, talk it loud. One epithet supplies their constant chime, Damn’d bad, damn’d good, damn’d low, or damn’d sublime. But most in quick short repartee they shine, Of local humour; or from plays purloin Each quaint stale scrap which every subject hits, Till fools almost imagine, they are wits. Hear them on Shakespeare! there they foam, they rage! Yet taste not half the beauties of his page, Nor see that art, as well as nature strove, To place him foremost in th’ Aonian grove. For there, there only, where the sisters join, His genius triumphs, and the work’s divine. Or would ye sift more near these sons of fire, ’Tis Garrick, and not Shakespeare, they admire, Without his breath, inspiring every thought, They ne’er perhaps had known what Shakespeare wrote; Without his eager, his becoming zeal, To teach them, though they scarce know why, to feel, A crude unmeaning mass had Jonson been, And a dead letter Shakespeare’s noblest scene. _A Charge to the Poets._ 1762, ll. 167-190. WILLIAM THOMPSON, 1763 (1712?-1766?) “_In Shakespeare’s Walk._” By yon hills, with morning spread, Lifting up the tufted head, By those golden waves of corn, Which the laughing fields adorn, By the fragrant breath of flowers, Stealing from the woodbine bowers, By this thought-inspiring shade, By the gleamings of the glade, By the babblings of the brook, Winding slow in many a crook, By the rustling of the trees, By the humming of the bees, By the woodlark, by the thrush, Wildly warbling from the bush, By the fairy’s shadowy tread O’er the cowslip’s dewy head, Father, monarch of the stage, Glory of Eliza’s age, Shakespeare! deign to lend thy face, This romantic nook to grace, Where untaught nature sports alone, Since thou and nature are but one. _Garden Inscriptions. Poetical Calendar, 1763._ First reprinted in Anderson’s _Poets of Great Britain_, 1794, vol. x. p. 993. SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1765 (1709-1784)