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The dreary midnight-hour is gone, time hastens on for

morn,

Yet, ere St. Barry's Church* tolls one, 'mid smiles shall Punch be born.

With acid and with sweetness now we fill each tumbler

fair,

Then whirl it round, and in the tide dash fleet the spirit

rare.

It sparkles up to meet each lip that doth the rummer kiss, And famed St. Patrick never saw Punch half so fine as this.

To Erin and her patriots firm, who shone in former days, With sighs to bless their memories, we now the goblet

raise;

And, should their shadows walk this earth, they'll take it not amiss

To be toasted by us Bacchanals in Punch so fine as this.

Her poets and her warriors brave, come, fill up full to

them;

And he who shuns the whiskey now, to water we'll condemn :

For spirit suits the spirited; and no bard, who dreams of

bliss,

E'er fancied, in his visions light, a spirit bright as this.

* The principal church in Cork.

A brimming bumper still remains, let's quaff it off to

night,

And each man drain his goblet deep, till morning meets his sight;

'Tis to some forms of wondrous pow'r, and not for worlds we'd miss

To drink the charms by which they reign in Punch so fine as this.

"Tis 'Woman!' draw the corks, my boys, and hand about the store

Of sweets and sours, and thus compose one bowl of whiskey more,

To drink dear woman's eye of light, and honied lip of

bliss,

In goblets deep, and running o'er with Punch so fine as

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POPE AND PHILIPS.

AMBROSE PHILIPS obtained much celebrity by his Pastorals, until Tickell brought a storm upon him, by an exaggerated compliment in “ The Guardian ;" in which, he made the true pastoral pipe descend in succession from Theocritus to Virgil, Spenser, and Philips. Pope, finding his own juvenile pastorals undervalued, sent to the same paper, a comparison between the Pastorals of Pope and Philips, in which he gave the preference to the latter. The irony was not detected till it encountered the critical eye of Addison; and the consequence was, the ruin of the reputation of Philips as a writer of Pastorals.

EURIPIDES.

SUCH was the veneration of the Sicilians for this celebrated Greek Poet, that, after the war with Sicily, in which the Athenians were defeated both by land and sea, and the greater part of the prisoners perished through absolute want and bad treatment, many of the survivors of those who were shut up in the dungeons of Syracuse, owed their freedom to their being

VOL. II.

L

able to recite some of the finest passages in the Tragedies of Euripides. When they returned to their own country, they immediately went and saluted the Poet as their deliverer, and informed him of the advantage they had derived from being acquainted with his verses.

ROBERT HERRICK.

ROBERT HERRICK, whom we have no hesitation in characterizing as the sweetest of songwriters in an age which produced Waller, Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace, was the son of a Goldsmith in Cheapside, and educated for the Church. By the patronage of the Earl of Exeter, he was presented with a Vicarage in Devonshire, from which he was ejected by the Parliamentary Commissioners, during the Civil War. He then assumed the habit of a Layman, and published, in 1648, his Poems, which are contained in a very scarce octavo volume, under the title of "Hesperides: or, the Works, both Humane and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq." The "Divine" Poems, which are separately paged, are entitled, "Noble Numbers, or his Pious Pieces," and bear date in the previous year. In

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