He felt this abandonment
bitterly, but could not surrender the all-absorbing passion which was
destroying him. He fell into a decline, and at last died "without a
struggle, just after writing a sonnet to _West-Country Dick_."
The poems so ingeniously introduced consist of a kind of sporting
opera called _King Tims the First_, which is the tragedy of an
emigrant butcher; an epic fragment in _ottava rima_, called _The
Fields of Tothill_, in which the author rambles on in the Byronic
manner, and ceases, fatigued with his task, before he has begun to get
his story under weigh; and miscellaneous pieces. Some of these latter
are simply lyrical exercises, and must have been written in Peter
Corcoran's earlier days. The most characteristic and the best deal,
however, with the science of fisticuffs. Here are the lines sent
by the poet to his mistress on the painful occasion which we have
described above, "after a casual turn up":
_Forgive me,--and never, oh, never again,
I'll cultivate light blue or brown inebriety;[1]
I'll give up all chance of a fracture or sprain,
And part, worst of all, with Pierce Egan's[2] society.
Forgive me,--and mufflers I'll carefully pull
O'er my knuckles hereafter, to make them, well-bred;
To mollify digs in the kidneys with wool,
And temper with leather a punch of the head_.
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