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The book we review is the work of a woman,
A fact which we think will be guessed at by no man,
Who notes the abuse which our virulent rage
Shall discharge on its author in every page.
And who is this woman—no recent offender,
A Jacobin, Shanavest, Whiteboy defender.
She who published “O’Donnel,” which (take but our word)
Is a monstrous wild“tissue of all that’s
absurd”—
Indeed there’s a something in all her romances,
Which, to tell our opinion, does not hit our fancies.
No, give us a novel, whose pages unfold
The glories of that blessed era of old,
When Princes legitimate trod on the people,
And the Church was so high that it out-topped the
steeple:
No, give us some Methodist’s maudling confusion,
Religion in seeming, in fact, persecution;
Some strange Anti-Catholic orthodox whining,
At this age of apostacy wildly repining!!
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This woman!—we scarce
could believe when we read,
Retorts all the charges we heaped on Her head;
And leads to rebellion young authors, by shewing,
That calling hard names is by no means reviewing.
She boasts that we’ve not spoilt her market in marriage,
That vainly her morals and wit we disparage;
But surely that man is the boldest
in life,
Who, in spite of our ravings, could take her for
wife;
And therefore we now set him down without mercy
As the slave of enchantment, “the victim of
Circe.”
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Now to come to the matter in hand—we advance
’Tis “an impudent lie,” when
she calls her book “France;”
A title that would not be characteristic,
Unless for a large Gazetteer or Statistic.
For we hold that it is not allow’d in a work,
To form our opinions by Ex pede
Here.
She ought to have visited Lyons, Bordeaux,
And peeped into Marseilles, and Strasburgh, and Meaux;
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| FIRST VISIT TO FRANCE—1815-1816. | 59 |
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For though the design of the Congress miscarries,
And Jacobins kick against Louis—at
Paris,
Though Freedom lies bleeding and chain’d on the
Seine,
And the emigrants there mould the state upon Spain,
In the rest of the kingdom, for what she can tell,
The impudent jade, things may go mighty well.
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Next comes her arrangement!—(when this we denounce
We must eke out our charge with a bit of a bounce;
And o’erlook the confusion which reigns in our head,
To charge it at once, on her book in the
stead)—
Of this book, my good readers, in vain you may hope
An account of its merits, its plan or its scope;
For the tale she relates does not chime with the
view
Which we take of France in our loyal review.
And though we should rail till our paper were shrinking,
Alas! we should but set the people a thinking.
On the list of errata ’twere better to
seize,
For thence we may conjure what blunders we please.
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These mixed with the few, which the best author makes,
In a work of such length, and our own worse
mistakes;
With some equivocation, and some “direct
lies,”
Of abuse will provide our accustom’d supplies;
Which largely diluted with loyalty rant,
With much hypocritical methodist cant,
Mis-quotations, mis-statements, distortions of phrase,
Will set the half-thinkers (we judge) in amaze,
And this “worm most audacious,” this
“woman so mad,”
This compound of all that’s presumptuous and bad—
(Tho’ we should not succeed in repressing her book,
And the youth of our land on its pages still look,)
Will perceive, with her friends, midst the people of fashion,
That the Quarterly scribe’s in a desperate passion.
Postscriptum—we’d near made a foolish omission,
And forgotten a slur on her Second Edition.
Though perhaps, after all, she may have the last word,
And reply to our “wholesome” remarks—by a Third—
And thus, like a sly and insidious joker,
The malice defeat of an hireling Croker!!
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