The Press.
London, England, 1854-02-18 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

156

A VALENTINE FROM ABERDEEN.
I've loved you, dear CZAR, all the days of my life,
At least since I joined in political strife ;
You've tried me in war, and you've tried me in peace ;
To revere and adore you I never shall cease.
At eve when I sit in my place in the Lords,
And CLANRICARDE inquires if we've yet drawn our swords ;
Or if DERRY his eloquent thunderbolts hurl,
And tell me 'tis time the old flag to unfurl.
If next morn in the Cabinet PALMERSTON sneer,
Saying peace bought with honour is peace bought too dear ;
If the papers re-echo his words and cry shame—
And the innocent Prince partakes in the blame.
If DISRAELI then shoot his arrowy wit,
While the Commons applaud, still unruffled I'll sit ;
I so love and adore you, however hard pressed,
For Europe, my CZAR, against war I'll protest.
Dear CZAR ! though 'tis true you're the star of my life,
Though I'll willingly bear being called an old wife ;
And although I had sanguinely reckoned last spring
The winter at latest concession would bring.
From my colleagues and self, and the Emperor NAP—
The wings of whose eagles I thought would but flap—
It grieves me, it wrings my old heartstrings to say,
There are ten thousand troops to the East on their way.
But, dear CZAR, don't be frightened—believe in your friend—
Of our warlike beginning this is but the end ;
To Constantinople they don't go direct—
The Cossacks before them we fully expect.

Dear CZAR I. doll't be wrath then—in haste do not jump
At the thought I've exhausted my protocol's pump ;
I shall answer with water Prince GORTIcHAKores fire—
Our troops go to Malta--at present no higher.
But speed, honoured master, my destiny's star,
Speed, speed, and I'll yet clasp the robe of my Czar ;
" Acrimonious letters " no more shall my fate
Require me to write on behalf of the State.

MR. MACAULAY'S " NEW ZEALANDER."
Ou eye was recently attracted by the following paragraph in an
amusing contemporary, Notes and Queries :
W ALPOLE AND MACAULAY.—That well•known and beautiful conception of the New
Zealander in some future age sitting on the ruins of London•bridge, and looking
viten London stood, may have been first suggested by a thought in one of Walpole's
lively letters to Sir H. Mann:—" At last some curious native of Lima will visit London,
and give a sketch of the ruins of Westminster and St. Paul's."
We can set our contemporary right upon this point. A more modern
author than WALPOLE or WILLIAM of Malmesbury (from whom Mr
MACAULAY has borrowed one of his best passages) supplies the original
of the idea so often quoted. In the dedication of SHELLEY'S " Peter
Bell the Third" to THOMAS BROWN, Esq., the younger, i.e., THOMAS
MOORE, the poet writes :

" Hoping that the immortality you have given to the Fudges you
" will receive from them, and in the firm expectation that when
" London shall be au habitation of bitterns—when St. Paul's and
" Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins, in the
" midst of an unpeopled marsh—when the piers of Waterloo-bridge
" shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the
" jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream—some
" TRANSATLANTIC COMMENTATOR will be weighing in the scales of some
" new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits
" of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians."
Several of Mr. MACAIIIAY'S finest sounding combinations of words
have been suggested by the poems of SHELLEY, or the intervention of
the FUDGES.

SEQUENTI

I N E I) I T A.

Regions Boreali
Terra Septentrionali,
Servorum Imperator
Nicolaus dominatur.
Fines ille jam majores
Ardet esse largiores,
Ergo petit excitare
Bellum stevitm militare;
Griecum amat Christianum,
Portum odit Ottcmanum,
Ita mittit gravem (Aram
Byzantinis Menschikolfum.

Qua 3 cum ita essent facts
ltegione bac subacta,

Grandis iste Senioris
Menten, quatit, sed majoris
Erant verbs sociorum
Quam minatio Russorum.

_
\ls Turcorum exardebat ;
Nisi bellurn nil manebat.

Virgam scindit hic legatus
Sava multa comminatus,
• Jecur tamen sustinebat
Abdul Medjid qui regebat.
" Prius se visurum palm
Dixit esse hunc legatum,
Quam sic insultare Turcis
Furem vellet dignum furcis."
Caesar autem Russiarum
Imperator hic totarum,
Simul atque comperisset
Statum rei qui fuisset,

Cumque turba Barbarorum
Istrum venit ad sonorum,
Pasha fortis Oltenitzam
Omar ivit, et funestam

Plagam mann veltemente
Hotiti dedit insolenti.
Terga vidit Kalofata
Haud decore fugam data.—

Sed Sinope sinuosa
Facts plorat lacrymosa ;
Qua Turcorum parva classis
Fuss jacet tiguis quassis.

Tali strage tandem motus
Etiam tardus iste Scotus,
"Tempus ait vim parare,
Nefas hoc non possum stare."
Jam Napoleon Ludovicus
Classem misit ad Beicos.
Jamque vela dat per undue
Nigri mans ecce Dundas.

Ducem vocat atque viros
Ad pugnandum nempe miros,
Jubet hos transire flumen,
(Ita enim velle numen,)
A rva 'feta Moldavorum
Occupare, Hospadorum
Nullo loco numerare,
Sed privatum testimare.

Venit dies, Imperator,
Quo to belli fulminator
Ut tam prorsus ctmmereris,
In teternum confunderis !

Daemon alter, atquo nomen
Idem tibi fiat omen,
Ab excelsis jam dejectus
Pcenam luit ima ectus

• Pecker ?

Inter sulfur et bitumen,
Vetus iste, malum numen ;
Hujus stirpis to propago
Perfidelis es imago:

WE are informed that by the last cornier to St. Petersburg the
PREMIER sent, as an affectionate present to his friend the CZAR,
" Collins's Ode to Peace," and Mrs. CHAPONE "On the Government of
the Passions."