Sketches in verse at home and abroad : and from the war of the Nile in ten cantos / by John McCosh.

  • McCosh, John, 1805-1885.
Date:
[1882]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sketches in verse at home and abroad : and from the war of the Nile in ten cantos / by John McCosh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sistence by picking them up and carrj'ing them to the nearest mill, where they are mashed into pulp to make new paper for new works of fiction and fantasy; and but for this process of evolution, all the old rags of all the old wives from John o’Groat’s to the Land’s End would be insufficient to meet the demand for raw material. In fact, Britannia seems to have fallen away from her ancient intellectual estate, and to be grovelling in smoke, and dust, and ashes, with a golden calf for her god, an engineer for her prophet, and an army of Titans in her pay, tearing the earth to pieces to feed her furnaces, dragging down the lightning from heaven to light her workshops, whilst the masterpieces of her painters and sculptors are only valued inas- much as she can make money by buying and selling them, and whilst the effusions of her best poets pass by her as the idle wind which she regards not—alga viliores ! However, a new era seems dawning upon the art of poetry. It is no longer confined to the shepherd and the ploughman, the weaver and the hammerman ; the nobles of foreign countries, even of our own country, are found cultivating Belles Lettres ! crowned heads aspire to the laurel wreath ! the King of Sweden