NO. XV.--TO SWAGGER.

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Not long ago I reminded you of CHEPSTOWE, the incomparable poet who
was at one time supposed to have revolutionised the art of verse.
Now he is forgotten, the rushlight which he never attempted to
hide under the semblance of a bushel, has long since nickered its
last, his boasts, his swelling literary port, his quarrels, his
affectations--over all of them the dark waves of oblivion have passed
and blotted them from the sand on which he had traced them. But in his
day, as you remember, while yet he held his head high and strutted
in his panoply, he was a man of no small consequence. Quite an army
of satellites moved with him, and did his bidding. To one of them
he would say, "Praise me this author," and straightway the fire of
eulogy would begin. To another he would declare--and this was his more
frequent course--"So-and-so has dared to hint a fault in one of us;
he has hesitated an offensive dislike. Let him be scarified," and
forthwith the painted and feathered young braves drew forth their axes
and scalping-knives, and the work of slaughter went merrily forward.
Youth, modesty, honest effort, genuine merit, a manifest desire to
range apart from the loud storms of literary controversy, these were
no protection to the selected victim. And of course the operations of
the Chepstowe-ites, like the "plucking" imagined by _Major Pendennis_,
were done in public. For they had their organ. Week by week in _The
Metropolitan Messenger_ they disburdened themselves, each one of his
little load of spite and insolence and vanity, and with much loud
shouting and blare of adulatory trumpets called the attention of the
public to their heap of purchasable rubbish. There lived at this time
a great writer, whose name and fame are still revered by all who love