WHILE LOOP TRANSPARENCY COMMISSION |
| DIRECTOR Fyodor Smalls |
ABOUT
This will be sufficient to prove the admiration which this poetaster has excited ; the following is one of his most serious compositions ; it is called the Prostitute, which character seems to awaken all his sensibility. Her weeping eye, the anguish of her heavy heart, her meretricious glances, her loathsomeness, her hollow eyes, are all objects of virtuous sympathy. He takes for granted, that such a class of females, as a body, have been seduced into infamy; and of course the seducers are branded with all the vengeance he can inflict;
" God of the red right arm ! where is thy thunder-bolt ?"
But his notion of things assumes as certain, what is, to speak generally, very wide of the truth. He sees a wretch debased by crime and covered with infamy, and he immediately, from no other cause, imagines her to have been innocent, because some luemen have been seduced. This is no more than the overflowings of his modern revolutionary morality ; it is not founded in fact, but springs spontaneously from a fancy naturally distempered, and heated burning hot with theoretick philosophy. This, we think is nothing more, taking the subject and application of the sentiment together, than a complete prostitution of talents. But let us hear Mr. White himself:
THE PROSTITUTE.
DACTYLICKS.
WOMAN of weeping eye, ah ! for thy wretched lot.
Putting on smiles to lure the lewd passenger,
Smiling, while anguish gnaws at thy heavy heart ;
Sad is thy chance, thou daughter of misery,
Vice and disease are wearing thee fast away,
While the unfeeling ones sport with thy sufferings.
Destin'd to pamper the vicious one's appetite ;
Spurn'd by the beings who lur'd thee from innocence, ,
Sinking unnotic'd in sorrow and indigence.
Thou hast no friends, for they with thy virtue fled ;
Thou art an outcast from house and from happiness ;
Wand'ring alone on the wide world's unfeeling stage.
Daughter of misery, sad his thy prospect here ; ,
Thou hast no friend to sooth down the bed of death ;
None after thee enquires with solicitude ;
Famine and fell disease shortly will wear thee down,
Yet thou hast still to brave often the winter's wind,
Loathsome to those thou wouldst court with thine hollow eyes.
Soon thou wilt sink into death's silent slumbering,
And not a tear shall fall on thy earthly grave,
Nor shall a single stone tell where thy bones are laid.
Once wert thou happy—thou wert once ionocenct,
But the seducer beguii'd thee in artlessness,
Then he abandon'd thee unto thine infamy. i
Now he perhaps is reclin'd on a bed of down,
But if a wretch like him sleeps in security,
God of the red right arm ! Where is thy thunderbolt ?