Different Attitudes in which Authors compose.—Bayes, Henry Stevens, Herodotus, etc.—Writing in Bed—in the Fields.—Plato and Sir Richard Blackmore.—Fiddling with Gloves and Twigs.—Madame de Staël.—Rhyming on the Road, in an old Calêche.

What various attitudes and ways

  And tricks we authors have in writing!

While some write sitting, some like BAYES

  Usually stand while they're inditing,

Poets there are who wear the floor out,

  Measuring a line at every stride;

While some like HENRY STEPHENS pour out

  Rhymes by the dozen while they ride.

HERODOTUS wrote most in bed;

  And RICHERAND, a French physician,

Declares the clock-work of the head

  Goes best in that reclined position.

If you consult MONTAIGNE and PLINY on

The subject, 'tis their joint opinion

That Thought its richest harvest yields

Abroad among the woods and fields,

That bards who deal in small retail

  At home may at their counters stop;

But that the grove, the hill, the vale,

  Are Poesy's true wholesale shop.

And verily I think they're right—

  For many a time on summer eves,

Just at that closing hour of light,

  When, like an Eastern Prince, who leaves

For distant war his Haram bowers,

The Sun bids farewell to the flowers,

Whose heads are sunk, whose tears are flowing

Mid all the glory of his going!—

Even I have felt, beneath those beams,

  When wandering thro' the fields alone,

Thoughts, fancies, intellectual gleams,

  Which, far too bright to be my own,

Seemed lent me by the Sunny Power

That was abroad at that still hour.

If thus I've felt, how must they feel,

  The few whom genuine Genius warms,

Upon whose soul he stamps his seal,

  Graven with Beauty's countless forms;—

The few upon this earth, who seem

Born to give truth to PLATO'S dream,

Since in their thoughts, as in a glass,

  Shadows of heavenly things appear.

Reflections of bright shapes that pass

  Thro' other worlds, above our sphere!

But this reminds me I digress;—

  For PLATO, too, produced, 'tis said,

(As one indeed might almost guess),

  His glorious visions all in bed.[1]

'Twas in his carriage the sublime

Sir RICHARD BLACKMORE used to rhyme;

  And (if the wits dont do him wrong)

Twixt death and epics past his time,[2]

  Scribbling and killing all day long—

Like Phoebus in his car, at ease,

  Now warbling forth a lofty song,

Now murdering the young Niobes.

There was a hero 'mong the Danes,

Who wrote, we're told, mid all the pains

  And horrors of exenteration,

Nine charming odes, which, if you'll look,

  You'll find preserved with a translation

By BARTHOLINOS in his book.

In short 'twere endless to recite

The various modes in which men write.

Some wits are only in the mind.

  When beaus and belles are round them prating;

Some when they dress for dinner find

  Their muse and valet both in waiting

And manage at the self-same time

To adjust a neckcloth and a rhyme.

Some bards there are who cannot scribble

Without a glove to tear or nibble

Or a small twig to whisk about—

  As if the hidden founts of Fancy,

Like wells of old, were thus found out

  By mystic trick of rhabdomancy.

Such was the little feathery wand,[3]

That, held for ever in the hand

Of her who won and wore the crown[4]

  Of female genius in this age,

Seemed the conductor that drew down

  Those words of lightning to her page.

As for myself—to come, at last,

  To the odd way in which I write—

Having employ'd these few months past

  Chiefly in travelling, day and night,

I've got into the easy mode

Of rhyming thus along the road—

Making a way-bill of my pages,

Counting my stanzas by my stages—

'Twixt lays and re-lays no time lost—

In short, in two words, writing post.

[1] The only authority I know for imputing this practice to Plato and Herodotus, is a Latin poem by M. de Valois on his Bed, in which he says:—

Lucifer Herodotum vidit Vesperque cubantem, desedit totos heic Plato saepe dies.

[2] Sir Richard Blackmore was a physician, as well as a bad poet.

[3] Made of paper, twisted up like a fan or feather.

[4] Madame de Staël.